An entirely new media landscape has emerged from the US presidential election with big tech taking over from legacy news as the main media powerbroker, according to a senior journalism analyst.
The world’s two richest people, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, both played a major role in how US election coverage panned out, media experts who spoke to Central News said.
“I think the issue here is that the media ecosystem in this election has really shown its colours. What we’ve seen is very different to what we saw in 2016 and 2020… in 2024, we were looking at an entirely new media landscape that emerged,” said Professor Monica Attard, co-director of the Centre for Media Transition at the University of Technology Sydney.
“The TV networks and the newspapers have seen themselves as being the traditional gatekeepers of information around elections… [and are] basically shrinking in their influence. And what we saw was the emergence of other realms so… TikTok and of course X…which has become a propaganda arm of the Republican party.”
She added as well as Elon Musk, the owner of X (previously Twitter), who became one of Donald Trump’s election campaign’s biggest benefactors, using his platform to influence the election, TikTok with its proliferation of views had moved comment away from more controlled traditional media.
In the weeks before the election both Amazon-founder Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, and LA Times owner philanthropist Patrick Soon-Shiong, drew criticism for changing their paper’s longstanding editorial policies of endorsing a candidate for president.
Bezos claimed the move was because the US public had lost trust in journalism, while Soon-Shiong’s decision was allegedly over Harris and Trump’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza. The Wall Street Journal, by comparison, has not endorsed a presidential candidate since 1928.
Dr Kit Candlin, a senior lecturer in the history of the Americas at the University of Newcastle NSW, was sceptical of the motivations behind the decision.
“With the injection of Elon Musk into the election mix there is also further evidence of the oligarchical shift in American business brought on by increasing amounts of tax cuts for the very wealthy over the last few decades which has made each of them exceedingly powerful,” he said.
“Musk aside, the three media barons, the Murdochs, Bezos and Soon-Shiong have interests that are so much greater than these three outlets.
“They are banking on the fact that once the election is over and folks calm down, they can win back subscribers. All three owners recognise however that the media landscape is changing rapidly anyway and none of them are particularly sold on traditional media.
“In a way that is similar to Musk at X, Bezos, for example, cares very little for the Post – his purchase of it seems to have been more of an exercise in raising his profile and his image rather than a way to make money. The net result of all of this is that the three outlets are, at least to a degree, expendable as are many of their subscribers.”
Maybe this is the last part of this big shift into a new way forward where we still have… this fourth estate to be critical of the first three estates and provide that voice, we need that… our democracy needs that.
Three members of the editorial board of the LA Times resigned after Soon-Shiong’s decision, including the editor, while it was claimed the Times had lost about 2,000 of its digital subscribers through cancellations. Meanwhile, it was reported The Washington Post had lost about a 10th of its digital subscribers, following Bezos’ decision.
Attard, an award-winning journalist and former ABC TV host of Media Watch, said the issue was not about the lack of endorsement for a presidential candidate, but that the newspapers no longer had much sway over voters.
“What that means is about whether newspaper editorials actually shift minds. Even more so, no,” she said. “But that’s not the point; the point is that you take a moral stand, you take a stand in the public interest, you take a stand for truth, and you put out there a considered view of what the truth is.”
Trust in news media continues to decline, with a recent Gallup poll finding only 31 per cent of Americans trusted mass media. Research has also found editorial endorsements in the US have little bearing on the way people vote.
Lester Munson, a long-time senior staffer in the US House and Senate and a non-resident fellow at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre (USSC), said the recent editorial decisions at the Post and Times signalled a shift for elite media in the way they are approaching the current political and demographic situation in the United States.
“The endorsement itself [is] not super relevant,” he told Central News. “Everyone knows the Post doesn’t like Trump, [so] they don’t have to write an editorial to tell you that, and the people who are reading it don’t need that editorial to tell them how to vote.
“So, I think it’s… a kind of a symbol of this last phase of adjustment to the new, digitalised economy, this more ecumenical and of the people approach.”
Munson, who is based in Washington DC, added: “Maybe this is the last part of this big shift into a new way forward where we still have… this fourth estate to be critical of the first three estates and provide that voice, we need that… our democracy needs that.”
In 2016, only 26 of America’s largest newspapers chose not to endorse a presidential candidate, according to the University of California’s Santa Barbara research project, compared to the 2020 US election, where only 54 endorsed Trump or Biden.
Reversing course to become an outlet which takes the perspective of more of the country is going to be difficult.
Yancey Orr, an associate professor and non-resident Fellow at USSC, said the mass media needed to broaden its views.
“For approximately 10 years, these newspapers have criticised Trump. That consistent message, legitimate or not, treated the social concerns of half of the country as irrelevant,” he said.
“At this point, the readership is more or less only Harris voters who chaff at their newspaper’s unwillingness to endorse her, and by extension, their own views.
“Reversing course to become an outlet which takes the perspective of more of the country is going to be difficult. CNN tried to become more impartial several years ago and lost viewership.
“Once you go down this path, it appears to be quite difficult to reverse course. Staff have quit and subscribers have left but this is part of the process of broadening the media to include views that have been ignored for a decade.”
Whilst Bezos used the Wall Street Journal’s lack of endorsement in part as justification for his decision, Attard believes this sudden decision to forgo endorsement by an owner who has other business interests that could be impacted by one candidate or another raises questions.
“You just look at what X did throughout the campaign,” she said. “It was alarming that you had Musk allegedly also, according to some research, tampering with the algorithm to privilege his own tweets, but in the year before the election was held, kind of building up this incredible audience and creating a space for people to be able to inform and misinform at will.
“That’s an awful lot of misinformation over a very long period of time, which was giving people the scope and the privilege of being able to say whatever they wanted regardless of its truth. Unchecked information in the public sphere for a very long period of time on the only [social media] platform that is news-orientated.
“He (Musk) bought a platform and then began to tinker with it to create a space where misinformation could flourish, and that’s exactly what happened.”
The role of TikTok in the election was also not to be underestimated.
“A recent statistic… said that on TikTok, for example, where individuals can become influencers, what’s considered to be a viral TikTok has, say, 25,000 views and shares, but 25,000 seems like a very small number if you take into consideration the way it’s amplified and the ways it’s shared,” said Attard.
“When you take that all into account… quite a lot of influencers on TikTok have very many more views than mainstream media had to watch… their gate-kept, ethically produced journalism on election night, which is quite extraordinary, so it’s really shifted the media landscape.
“The landscape has shifted and changed, and in a sense, mainstream media hasn’t kept up, and I think it’s very clear that the Democratic Party didn’t keep up either.”
Main images of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk by wikimedia.
