Analogously, Trump is Kennedy and Biden/Harris is Nixon.
Kennedy and Nixon on the TV debate stage in 1960. Kennedy’s hair won the debate.
29 November 2024 — Analogously, Trump is Kennedy and Biden/Harris is Nixon. And the social web is 2024, what TV was in 1960. Trump has mastered the new medium. To a large extent, he created the new medium, and the resulting network formed around him.
So when James Carville, a Democratic “strategist” says he wants to figure out how to communicate the way Trump did, he can’t because his way doesn’t work in his universe. He has to create his own.
Analogously Nixon might have said about TV in 1959 “How can we get into that?” If you have to ask you can’t get there. You have to fit like a hand-in-a-glove, like Kennedy or Trump. They already had their media masters on board (Kennedy was surrounded by Madison Avenue execs, and Trump had the largest retinue of social media “influencers” and social media builders ever used in any political campaign) and they had been building/testing their candidate’s use of the new medium well before the 1960 debate – and the 2024 run in Trump’s case.
The next Democratic candidate to win the presidency (futile at this point in the curve) will have to be a media creator. He/she and the party must create a medium that’s perfectly adapted to the communication interests of the 50% of the electorate that voted for Harris and the other 20 percent who would if they just knew who she was.
Look at the picture of Kennedy and Nixon above. Did we elect Kennedy over Nixon because he had better policy? No. We elected him because he has better hair. Because on TV what counts is your hair.
Note to readers: those of us that have studied that 1960 debate know the polling results. Focus groups that watched the debate marked Kennedy as the clear winner. But focus groups who only heard the audio transmission marked Nixon as the clear winner.
So if you want to win, you create an internet farm system just like the Republicans did. A network with everyone who wants to run for office nationwide on the Democratic ticket. And let’s see how they work in the new medium. We get to know them like we knew Archie Bunker. And let’s get some people we get to know who also tend to tell the truth, though they can screw up and we’ll forgive them – remember the “gotchas!” are over.
I thought about all of this yesterday as I began researching and writing my traditional end-of-year long-form essay. Which this year will be on the massive paradigm shift in the news media, and media in general, that helped secure Trump his victory. That shift has been in progress for years. Herein just a few notes from what will be a bang on brilliant essay 🤪
The thing that got me rolling was that for Generation Z (often shortened to Gen Z, and also known as Zoomers) this was their first opportunity to vote in a U.S. Presidential election. And they came out in droves.
And the Pew Research Polls (considered to be among the most accurate polling systems) showed most members of Generation Z catch up on the news via social media apps like Instagram and in particular TikTok, and have totally abandoned main stream media. And media outlets have been forced to adapt to serve that behavior.
In fact, social media has become a point of discovery for just about everything — for interests, for influencers, for news, for whatever. That doesn’t mean that they are not having further conversations with their peers about stuff. But they seem to be abandoning further/other sources of information, of research.
Oh, yes. With platforms like Facebook and TikTok as your sole news source you get led down the path of misinformation. But I’ll cover that in my essay.
This shift came front-and-center when Elon Musk told his users on X on November 6th, the day Donald Trump became president-elect, “You are the media now“. And then admitted this past week that X is throttling links on his social network so users do not get links to original sources.
For the media biz this is huge, but just another sign that the humble hyperlink – the connective tissue of the open web – has fallen on hard times.
Earlier this century, when first Google and then social networks conquered the attention economy, they left the legacy media and other online publishers a consolation prize: the chance to siphon readers back to their websites via links. The local news outlet might no longer be its readers’ daily portal to the wider world, but at least its grabbiest stories still stood a chance of topping their search results or Facebook feeds. That meant eyeballs and therefore revenue.
Ah, those were the days 😢
Facebook began de-emphasizing posts from publishers around 2017 in favor of posts from friends, family and groups, along with images, memes and videos uploaded directly to Facebook. YouTube, Instagram and TikTok gave rise to new classes of influencers and creators who connected with audiences and made money directly on their platforms — often discussing news they read elsewhere without directing viewers to the source. The term of art for such posts betrays the platforms’ bias: “native content”
On YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, there’s often no way to link to outside sources in your posts. That has left publishers to find workarounds, like posting an image or video that implores users to find a link to the content elsewhere, such as on their bio page.
And so that left Google and Twitter as hubs for links. But Google is starting to answer users’ questions directly with AI before presenting a list of links. As for Twitter, now X, Musk has positioned it as a replacement for rather than a portal to the news media. Since buying the platform, Musk has touted it as a hub for “citizen journalists” who post directly on X rather than linking to their work elsewhere. He has also trumpeted his disdain for traditional media and even used X’s algorithm to throttle links to specific news outlets or rival online forums.
Yep. “You are the media now”.
For social media platforms, suppressing links is seen as good business. But it’s complicated:
• Links are lifeblood for web publishers, and they can be handy for users who want to point each other to original sources, in-depth reporting or delightful content. Adding a link to a post also can be an indicator of credibility on social media – a sign that you aren’t just spouting off but have outside evidence to support your claims and are happy for your audience to check it out for themselves.
• But tech giants have come to see links as a drain on the bottom line, because they pull users’ valuable eyeballs away from the platform. There’s also the reality that some links lead to malware, scams or misinformation, though Musk didn’t cite that as a reason for suppressing them.
And so the decline of the link has helped give rise to the “news influencer”.
As traditional media that report the news have lost audience and stature, social media influencers who talk about the news have thrived, according to a recent nationally representative survey by Pew Research. The survey found that 1 in 5 Americans — and 37% of adults under 30 — say they regularly get news from influencers on social media.
Some 85% of those influencers maintain a presence on X, while a little less than half have accounts on Instagram and YouTube. They’re more likely to be men than women, Pew found, and more likely to lean conservative than liberal. Three-quarters have never worked for a news organization.
The leading alternative to X is only somewhat friendlier to link posts. Since it launched in July 2023, Meta’s Threads has emerged as the most popular alternative to X, drawing hundreds of millions of users. Threads doesn’t explicitly suppress link posts — but its algorithm may do so implicitly, by prioritizing posts that get likes and comments over those that generate clicks.
There is one X alternative, meanwhile, taking a different approach. As Will Oremus noted in the Washington Post yesterday:
“We love links because we love the open web,” Bluesky CEO Jay Graber said on her site last week. After Musk’s post on Monday, Bluesky’s official X account shared Graber’s post with the caption, “Post your links on Bluesky.” News organizations are obliging, with some reporting they’re already seeing far more traffic from Bluesky than from Threads despite its smaller size.
Bluesky may have slightly miscalculated, however, by adding a link to download Bluesky in its X post. While the Bluesky account has 436,000 X followers, X’s algorithm only showed the post to 43,000 people.
That’s the success of throttling for you.
The tectonic shift in the news media/media in general deserves a book. And a few are already out, but some really good ones will be in the offing in 2025.
In my end-of-the-year post I will try to approach the major themes in media — fragmentation, disintermediation, concentration (of power and attention) and virtualization — from a political use standpoint.
In a way these themes represent the “low background hum” operating in the news/media business today. They began to disrupt content distribution over the last decade, and will certainly disrupt content creation over the next.
And this doesn’t even address the biggest threat for creatives – GenAI – which will vastly increase the supply of competitive content, but also undermine the economic foundation of the news and media and entertainment industries.
More to come.