Legacy media is losing America

Earning the attention of more Americans, especially those who are not firmly in a political camp, requires telling the truth.

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The first robust study of what really happened in the 2024 election should serve as a wakeup call to Democrats and to legacy media.

In the immediate aftermath of the election, outlets such as the New York Times and MSNBC, where liberal voters flock, pushed an idea that Vice President Kamala Harris had not been progressive enough. As this argument went, she would have energized more voters, especially younger ones, who were in the midst of some sort of giant surge in progressive activism, if she had just given in to their demands on Gaza or avoided what The Atlantic called “moving right on the border.”

This is the opposite of what happened, according to the new study. I dug into it for the new episode of They Stand Corrected, my podcast and newsletter fact checking the news.

Blue Rose Research, a Democratic firm, pulled together millions of data points, including at the precinct level. When it comes to getting a realistic picture, this is night-and-day different from the notoriously unreliable exit polls news agencies cite. In 2016, exit polls sparked the myth that a majority of white women supported Republican nominee Donald Trump over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Later, much more trustworthy figures showed a tie in that demo, with neither getting a majority. That still shocked some who saw it, but the myth remains cemented in the minds of millions.

The new study finds that voters saw Harris as “more ideologically extreme than Trump.” Half (49%) saw her as more liberal than they are, far more than the 39% who saw Trump as more conservative than they are. Meanwhile, young voters “have gone from being the most progressive generation since the Baby Boomers, and maybe even in some ways more so, to becoming potentially the most conservative generation that we’ve experienced maybe in 50 to 60 years,” David Shor, head of data science at Blue Rose Research, told the Times.

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In a separate interview with Vox, Shor explained that progressives were not the ones who sat out the election. “There were a lot of Democratic voters who were angry at their party last year. And they were mostly moderate and conservative Democrats angry about the cost of living and other issues.” They couldn't bring themselves to vote for Trump, but “a lot of them stayed home.”

You wouldn’t know this from legacy media, which, like so many Americans, are largely entrenched in echo chambers. New York Times readers are more liberal than the population and “more liberal than they were four years ago, even though the country went the other way,” Shor told the Times’ Ezra Klein. “There's this great political divergence, you know, between people who consume all the news sources that we know about and read about versus the people who don't.”

The key question for the media to consider is why people other than committed liberals aren’t paying attention to them. In a recent episode, I explained what happens when news organizations address their low trust scores: They instinctively blame the right-wing attack machine and the ways that so many opinion voices now come blaring through our phones, drowning out the news.

These phenomena do deserve some of the blame. But mainstream news giants also need to look in the mirror. For many years, they have failed in their mission. They have turned into “open mic nights” for people to make claims without being fact checked. They have refused to correct their own errors, even when presented with concrete proof.

In short, legacy media have not earned the attention of Americans, especially those who are not firmly in a political camp and simply want the truth. I hear from people all the time, from across the political spectrum, saying they’ve given up on traditional media because they can no longer trust it to provide the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So they turn to the voices that seem the most “reasonable” to them, knowing that some of what they’re told anywhere won’t be accurate.

The real revolution would be for a news agency to report only fact-checked information. No more sitting still while Trump or anyone else recites lies. Inside news agencies, there are fantastic journalists who want this to happen. Many of the fiascoes I discuss on They Stand Corrected are brought to me by reporters and editors who can’t get their bosses to listen to them. They see which stories are not fact checked and which stories are ignored altogether.

To help more people understand the dangers of Trumpism, big news agencies need to earn their attention. Yes, some people don’t care what’s true. But many do. If news agencies become trustworthy bastions of truth at all times, they’ll stand a better chance of winning over a far larger, more representative audience.

Josh Levs is host of They Stand Corrected, the podcast and newsletter fact-checking the media. Find him at joshlevs.com.

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