Who’s the real loser in the 2024 election? Mainstream media.

The decision by the Washington Post not to endorse a presidential candidate for the first time in 36 years has roiled the newspaper, triggered a flood of subscription cancellations, and generated reams of commentary about media ownership and journalistic integrity.

But in the cacophony of a campaign in its final week, the tempest over endorsements felt like a holdover from a passing era of mass media consumption. Media fragmentation, partisanship, and distrust of legacy news outlets, particularly from the right, now prevent campaigns from directly pitching through mainstream media.

The hunt for blocs of persuadable voters who get their news from algorithmic digital feeds has propelled presidential candidates to the studios of podcasters and social-media influencers, largely bypassing traditional media and journalistic scrutiny.

News reports still move across digital platforms and feed election-related debate. But they jostle for attention with text, audio, and video generated by political partisans, sometimes spliced with fake or digitally manipulated images, along with clickbait claims, counterclaims, and hot takes from obscure sources, churned into a ceaseless flow of monetizable content. Expertise takes a back seat to emotions. Truth is increasingly elusive.

“I think that this election will be looked at by future historians as a time when the podcast culture and the digital culture determines what constitutes information that should be consumed,” says Jeffrey Dvorkin, a former news executive who served as NPR’s first ombudsman. “The challenge for mainstream media is to reaffirm their reliability. But too often, the public doesn’t care as much about that as perhaps it once did.”

For a generation reared on digital media, distinctions between types of news sources have eroded. In a Pew Research survey taken in September, young adults ages 18 to 29 are as likely to trust information from social media (52%) as they are to trust national news organizations (56%) for that. Among all adults, the gap was nearly 20 points, with far less trust in social media.

Trust in U.S. news media has been falling for decades, a point that Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post, made in an opinion piece defending his decision to nix candidate endorsements, which he said create “a perception of bias.” Mr. Bezos denied that the decision was guided by his business interests, saying there was no quid pro quo after a meeting last week between the CEO of his space-rocket company and former President Donald Trump, the GOP nominee. Critics say Mr. Bezos is trying to placate Mr. Trump, whom Amazon accused in 2019 of strongarming the Pentagon into denying it a cloud-computing contract in retaliation for the Post’s reporting on his administration. A lawsuit was dismissed in 2021.

“Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose,” Mr. Bezos wrote. He added, “Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.”

“Trustworthy” media is a thing of the past

While trust in the news media has declined broadly since the 1970s, the biggest shift is on the political right. In 2000, 47% of Republicans had a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in the news media to report fairly and accurately, according to Gallup. By 2024, that share fell to 12%. Over the same period, the share of Democrats who trusted the media – just over half – was unchanged. Independents have tracked the decline among Republicans, though less precipitously.

Asking conservatives to assess news media is problematic in an era of hyperpartisan outlets, notes Diana Mutz, a professor of political science and communications at the University of Pennsylvania who runs multiyear panel surveys of voters. “The media is really not a single entity anymore,” she says. “If you ask [Republicans] if they trust their own media, they trust it more than ever. They see their own sources as highly reliable and trustworthy.”

Those sources, notably Fox News and rival right-wing broadcasters, are closely aligned with the politics of Mr. Trump, in ways that aren’t fully mirrored on the left, where mainstream news outlets, from network and cable TV to radio and national newspapers, are authoritative fonts of information for Democrats, as well as some independents and conservatives.

During the Trump presidency, this media consumption divide became a chasm as national news organizations sought to scrutinize his administration and its backsliding on democratic norms. In some cases, robust reporting was cheered by partisans as a form of resistance to Mr. Trump, who labels the news media “enemies of the people.”

In 2018, Stephen Bannon, a former campaign strategist for Mr. Trump, framed this antagonism in stark terms. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Mr. Bannon told author Michael Lewis. “The real opposition is the media” and, he added, the way to deal with them is to “flood the zone” of digital media with junk content to disorient consumers and distract from fact-based reporting.

Mr. Bannon has since done just that as a right-wing media personality who also played a key role in Mr. Trump’s effort to reverse his 2020 election defeat. On Tuesday, he was released from a federal prison after serving four months for contempt of Congress over his defiance of a subpoena from investigators into the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.

Analysts say Mr. Bannon’s approach has become something of a playbook for right-wing partisans. Mr. Trump’s own Truth Social network is awash in conspiracies, falsehoods, and debunked rumors, often emanating from its owner. Similarly, Elon Musk, the owner of the social media platform X and a backer of Mr. Trump, has used the platform to spread misinformation about election fraud and other topics after dismantling verification teams that conservatives saw as biased against them.

Such unchecked misinformation makes it harder for the news media to sift fact from fiction and for the public to find reliable information, says Mr. Dvorkin, now a senior fellow at Massey College at the University of Toronto. The net effect on voters may be to lessen their faith in a messy democratic process, which depends on a shared set of facts. “At a time when it’s more difficult to get reliable and contextual information, people will move towards simple solutions,” he says.

Still, it’s unclear how persuasive the flood-the-zone strategy actually is in winning elections that hinge on a handful of swing states. The vast majority of voters don’t change their minds between presidential elections, says Professor Mutz, and the minority that do aren’t necessarily immersed in a cacophony of unreliable digital content.

“Most of the misinformation that’s out there is being promoted and consumed by people who aren’t going to change their vote anyway,” she says.

Male podcasters like Joe Rogan are the go-to GOP bullhorn

On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump has sought out podcasters like Joe Rogan and other male hosts, including comedians and sports aficionados popular with younger men, a demographic that Mr. Trump needs to turn out. Similarly Vice President Kamala Harris has appeared on podcasts such as “Call Her Daddy” and spoken to Charlamagne Tha God, a Black radio and podcast host.

Ms. Harris has also sat for interviews with national news media, whose requests Mr. Trump largely eschews. (One such interview with CBS News “60 Minutes” sparked controversy over the network’s editing of her remarks that appeared to flatter Ms. Harris.)

In a fragmented media landscape, getting the attention of voters who aren’t partisan news consumers is fraught, says Daniel Kreiss, a professor of political communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “They’re not following this stuff on a regular basis, but they are consuming sports and lifestyle content more regularly,” he says. These voters “are the least attentive and therefore they’re the most open to changing their minds.”

This has made podcasters a campaign priority more so than national outlets that were once seen as essential for candidates.“The legacy media simply does not have the reach and influence that it once did, but no outlet does,” says Professor Kreiss.

The Post joins the editorial boards of the Los Angeles Times and USA Today in staying neutral in the 2024 race, after all three newspapers endorsed Joe Biden in 2020. (The Monitor does not endorse political candidates.) Analysts say that endorsements carry weight in state and local races where candidates are less familiar to voters, which isn’t the case in a presidential election. In 2016, Mr. Trump was opposed by almost all national and metropolitan newspaper editorial boards – and won.

What Mr. Trump did in that race and is doing now, says Professor Kreiss, is to communicate with voters in a way that cuts through a fragmented media landscape. He tells a consistent story “that drums out all the other noise. It’s always about these forces that are threatening white Americans, white Christian Americans, white rural Americans, that ‘us and them.’ It’s a clear, compelling story in a very clear moral universe. Who are the bad guys? Who are the good guys? Who’s doing this to you? … Everyone knows what that story is.”