Media

Axios -The mainstream media's dominance in narrative- and reality-shaping in presidential elections shattered in 2024, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write in a "Behind the Curtain" column.... How and where Americans get informed has broken into scores of pieces — from young men on Joe Rogan's podcasts, to suburban women following Instagram influencers. Both campaigns have targeted small, often little-appreciated shards to reach hyper-specific pockets of potential voters. The campaigns are doing this with unorthodox, sometimes lengthy media appearances and precision ad targeting...

This new fragmented reality is the future — not just of elections, but also for how America learns about business, products, technology, culture and current event...Top executives and officials tell us that reaching people ages 35 and under with any message — or even major event — is almost impossible. Or they've seen an eight-second clip with no context, so they have a very different understanding of what happened than someone who saw a mainstream report. These are the TV cord-cutters, living in fractured communities on Instagram, TikTok and streaming audio.

Ben LaBolt, White House communications director and senior adviser, told us: "Whether you're president or CEO, when you reach the [network] evening news, you're only hitting [a total of] 20 million Americans — and we've increasingly found that Americans 35 and under aren't consuming news from traditional outlets at all." More

NPR - Over 15 columnists at The Washington Post called the paper's decision not to endorse a presidential candidate a "terrible mistake" in an opinion piece on the paper’s website.