Recent decades have seen the increasing fragmentation of media in the US. Now, alongside growing partisan media, new forms such as podcasts have emerged as important influences on politics and society . Daniel Jackson, Andrea Carson andFilippo Trevisan give an overview of work taken from their recent US Election Analysis report which examines US media fragmentation and the 2024 election. They write that the election’s outcome reflects the growth of alternate mainstream public conversations across fractured media, conversations that increasingly do not overlap.
This article is part of ‘The 2024 Elections’ series curated by Peter Finn (Kingston University). The series has explored the 2024 US elections at the state and national level. If you are interested in contributing to the series, contact Peter Finn (p.finn@kingston.ac.uk).
Less than two weeks after the US 2024 presidential election, we published the US Election Analysis report, with the immediate thoughts, reflections, and early research insights of over 100 leading scholars on the election. Capturing the world’s attention, this electoral event highlights fundamental shifts in the media’s role in campaigns and politics, reflecting broader ongoing changes in power, media culture, and political polarization. Some of the most significant shifts in the media we have seen in this election have included media fragmentation, the growing influence of new media forms such as podcasts, the loss of independence and waning relevance of traditional media and we assess what this means for democratic and media futures. You can read the articles we mention below and all scholarly contributions in our report here.
Media fragmentation and polarization
We live in fractured societies, and the US election coverage that came from a fragmented news ecosystem reflected this. In 2015 and 2016, the rise to political prominence of Republican nominee, property billionaire and part-time television personality Donald Trump, coincided with the growing influence of ‘alt-right’ media such as Breitbart, InfoWars, and Gateway Pundit. This suited Trump, as although traditional news media gave him considerable airtime, they also had the pesky habit of fact-checking his claims and investigating his political and private transgressions. By comparison, the alt right gave him an uncritical platform and plaudits.
Fast forward to 2024, and while the boldness with which alt-right outlets openly support Trump was unsurprising, Scott A. Eldridge II argues their intense antagonism towards any Trump opponents was pronounced:
“They have gone from primarily targeting Democrats and mainstream media to also critiquingRepublicans who opposed Trump and anyone in the right-wing media ecosystem who is not deferential to the MAGA agenda.”
On the right, he writes that alternative media outlets have adopted often emotive and polarized language to address their audiences and reach a so-called “unheard” and “abandoned” populist public. They are dividing rather than informing the public, widening the cracks in our already fractured societies. Recognising this, Eldridge II says that we need to distinguish between those who act journalistically – even if alternatively – and those who instead prioritize political outcomes and disguise it as journalism. This call for distinction has become especially urgent following the 2024 election.
The power of podcasting
Approximately half of the American population of voting age – an estimated 135 million people – report listening to a podcast at least monthly, a figure that has more than doubled since 2016. On Election Day, conservative podcast hosts Dan Bongino and Steven Crowder emerged as the top streamers, each attracting around half a million viewers on Rumble, surpassing all other media entities except for Fox and NBC.
In our report, Ava Kalinauskas and Rodney Taveira explore the important role of nontraditional media in the US presidential election coverage, showing how it shaped the race in unprecedented ways. Crucially, they argue that:
“The porous ecosystem of the podcasting and streaming “manosphere” abuts stand-up comedy, mixed martial arts, and online bro culture, and it elevates figures such as Elon Musk, Ben Shapiro, and Jordan Peterson, who offer unapologetic claims for traditional gender roles and sorties against “wokeism.” Rogan might be the gravitational centre around which this ecosystem orbits, and it contours well with Trump’s anti-establishment message and rebuke of mainstream media.”
The Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, also sought to reach young people via popular women’s podcasts like Call Her Daddy and a Saturday Night Live appearance the weekend before the election, but for her it was too little too late. Contrast that with Trump who, in his bid to court the so-called “bro vote,” engaged dozens of podcasters and streamers on the political fringe who share a common audience of young, politically disengaged men. In the final days of the campaign, Trump – followed by the then Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance, then billionaire backer Elon Musk – appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience, America’s most-consumed podcast, which culminated in Rogan offering his endorsement of the Republican ticket.
Photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash
This strategy appears to have been successful, with Trump achieving massive gains among young men, winning this demographic 49 percent to Harris’ 47 percent, having lost them to Biden in 2020 (52 percent to Trump’s 41 percent).
This focus on non-traditional outlets in 2024 reflects a new phase in the evolution of campaign “microtargeting,” tailoring a message to specific blocs of voters rather than appealing to the masses. As Kalinauskas and Taveira argue:
“The benefits of engaging with these non-traditional outlets seem clear: cutting through a saturated media market; leveraging the parasocial relationships between hosts and their fans; less chance of pushback than from a trained journalist.”
It also indicates just how ubiquitous alternative and “new media” has become, and their shift from the fringe to the centre of our body politic.
Traditional media: battling for relevance?
In further evidence of this trend, a Pew Research Center survey on where people got their 2024 election news revealed hundreds of different sources – many non-journalistic – a far cry from the more concentrated and stable media environment of the past. As Matt Carlson, Sue Robinson and Seth Lewis argue, this shift is indicative of a move away from mainstream journalism as both a news source and as agenda-setters.
In News After Trump the same authors have documented journalism’s “crisis of relevance” amidst a traditional media funding crisis, changes in news consumption, and attacks from the right. In our 2024 report, both Nik Usher and Kenneth Campbell argue that newspapers failed to assert their relevance in critical ways. Both the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times declined to endorse a presidential candidate, drawing criticism from the chattering classes. But the non-endorsement trend goes far beyond these newspapers, with Axios analysis showing that only about 30 percent of the nation’s top 100-circulation newspapers endorsed a presidential candidate in 2024, down from 80 percent only eight years prior. For Usher,
“This failure to endorse a presidential candidate must be seen as not just an abdication of moral leadership, but a deeply concerning sign that the economic fragility of the American news media has compromised news judgement itself.”
In a withering critique of the news media’s failure to challenge “the obvious dangers that Trump posed to democracy”, Victor Pickard points towards the extreme commercialism that has led to “systemic failures” such as racial and class-based redlining, market censorship, ever-expanding news deserts, and degraded information. It also creates the conditions for monopolistic control over entire sectors of the US communication and information infrastructures that allow oligarchs to capture them.
An uncertain future
In the 2024 US Presidential election, the deep chasm between the information environments of right-leaning and left-leaning people was stark. As Carlson et al observe, America now nurtures alternate mainstream public conversations, and they increasingly do not overlap. As a result, people who voted for Trump simply do not believe the claims made against him, or the legitimacy of his conviction as a felon. Rather, traditional coverage is seen as just unproven rumour in a world where facts are no longer sacred.
We have all seen the transition from mass communication dominance to platform proliferation and fractured media ecosystems. But it is precisely because this trend has become so normalized that it takes a media event of this magnitude to see that the 2024 US election outcome reflects the consequences of a fractured media culture.