The End of the Line for the Democratic Media Strategy

Like many things that happen first slowly, then suddenly, the big media strategy that served Democrats for generations has collapsed. Congress’s recent move to defund NPR/PBS and the announcement that CBS will discontinue The Late Show With Stephen Colbert after the host’s contract ends next May have caused panic on the left.

This should cause the Democrats to rethink their strategy, but that is unlikely. Long used to being able to control narratives and suppress information that hurts them, they have forgotten how to convince people of anything.

Democrats and the left have prided themselves not only on the belief that they are morally good and their opponents evil, but also on supposedly being much smarter than the toothless rubes who have not bent the knee to them. This conceit was afforded by the fact that their long march through the institutions had been largely successful. They control almost all the major educational institutions and, significantly, apart from AM radio, Fox News, and X (formerly Twitter), they dominate almost all the traditional forms of media.

A funny thing happened, however, on the way to Democratic dominance: The internet jeopardized the ability to dominate media. The big newspapers, the big television and radio networks, and the cable channels that had for decades served as mouthpieces of the left were suddenly not the only game in town.

First, bloggers started gaining power. Large corporations were able to contain the worry about bloggers by channeling most new media traffic into large social media platforms that were also instruments of the left. But this hobbled traditional media further. Social media figures, then podcasters, and now bloggers resurrected on Substack have all started gaining readers, listeners, and viewers.

One might have thought that the Democratic strategy would have changed with all this. They might have rethought the idea of their top-down strategy of tightly controlling narratives, many of them extraordinarily offensive to at least half (and often more) of Americans, that are handed down from on high and delivered through their own trusted networks—including ones the government was forcing the American people to fund such as NPR and PBS. They might have realized that the post-Jon Stewart entertainment blitz of unfunny comedians giving political lectures on the late-night television circuit no longer had any purchase on the American mind. They might have considered that, though they had owned the corner on cool and were able to label half of America as “deplorable,” that media world was now dead.

But they didn’t.

Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 showed that a single maverick from the old world of stardom could defeat the entire array of news and entertainment grandees lined up against him. What was funny about that victory was that he did it on the cheap. It was the big media people constantly putting him up on their screens and in print that helped spread his popularity, despite the fact that they were universally against him.

The last hurrah of the Democratic media strategy was probably 2020, when Big Tech colluded to kill off Parler, the fast-growing competitor to Twitter, and to censor the one heretical outlet of the old media world, The New York Post, which had dared to report on the Hunter Biden laptop. The cabal had succeeded one last time. It would not succeed again. 

The 2024 election saw Democrats running the same playbook again and again. First, covering up Joe Biden’s physical health. Then, when forced to tell the truth, they pivoted to assisting in installing Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee. They dutifully sent out highly coordinated messaging through their old channels about how wonderful the then-Vice President was and how much momentum she had. They had their old-media celebrities gather at the behest of Oprah to say how wonderful Harris was. The late-night hosts put Doug Emhoff and Tim Walz on and pretended to believe they were the emissaries of a new masculinity of sorts. The daytime news hosts played down the fact that foreign gangs were taking over apartment buildings in a major American city. 60 Minutes even edited a Harris interview to make her look better.

It didn’t work. The public, which had grown to distrust our news media and ignore celebrity political opinions, rejected the Democrats at the polls.

Now, Donald Trump and the Republicans have killed funding for NPR and PBS. Despite the laments, most Americans aren’t going to care. Louisiana Senator John Kennedy posted a video last week on X exposing how these public networks violated the public trust. Among the doozies were NPR stories labeling rural Americans as “Christian nationalists,” country music and bird names as racist, and propaganda pieces celebrating Biden’s transgender assistant secretary of HHS, Rachel Levine, and declaring that men have no biological advantages over women in sports.   

Humorously, Democrats seem even more upset about the news from CBS that the network is allowing Stephen Colbert’s contract to expire. The overheated commentary about the “chilling” effect of “silencing” this purported comedian is pretty funny. Colbert’s show will be on the air until next year!

As multiple outlets have reported, the decision to cancel Colbert doesn’t really need a conspiracy theory involving CBS’s desire to please “King Trump” to explain it. The Late Show With Stephen Colbert lost $40 million last year. His salary is $20 million. If anything, as many people have observed, his show was likely kept on because of the political service it rendered to liberals, rather than canceled because of it.

Colbert’s show, like almost all the others on these days, forsook the time-tested approach of political neutrality that made Johnny Carson and Jay Leno popular with a broad swath of Americans. As a result, its appeal was only to half the country—at most. While Colbert may have been funny parodying a blustering, arrogant conservative talk show host early on in his career, his hosting a show in which he is a blustering, arrogant liberal talk show host is not funny. 

That so many mediocre Democratic politicians have been paying tribute to him with pictures of themselves on his show (Stacey Abrams, Hakeem Jeffries, Amy Klobuchar) is a pretty good indication that Colbert’s show was about fan service—not for the fans of comedy but for his fans at the Democratic National Committee. As one X user aptly observed, “CBS was basically running a high-production-value MSNBC late-night variety show and wanted advertisers to act like it was a Magically Broadly Popular program coming off a banger prime-time lineup in 1987.”

The old media world is dead. If the Democrats want to succeed, they will have to acknowledge that and move on. It will be difficult for them, however. In that old world, they had a bullhorn to drown out other voices. That is no longer the case. Americans can hear each other now. They know that they aren’t the only ones who think the people and ideas being promoted by big media are not necessarily good or true, and the ones being demonized are not necessarily bad or false.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.