By siding with the Democrats in the U.S. election, national networks and major newspapers gave up their dominance of the industry

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Besides partisan Democrats, among the United States election’s biggest losers is what is commonly called — inaccurately — “mainstream media.” Accustomed to acting as information gatekeepers and setting the “acceptable” range of discussions, journalists woke up on Nov. 6 to discover that years of eroding credibility had culminated in what they feared the most: irrelevance in the eyes of many Americans.

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It was a long time coming as name-brand news outlets picked sides in the country’s political disputes, fighting with whole segments of the population. The result is a fractured media landscape in which old titans wither, new outlets rise and nobody fully dominates the space.

A few weeks before the election, Gallup reported of its polling that “Americans continue to register record-low trust in the mass media, with 31 per cent expressing a ‘great deal’ or ‘fair amount’ of confidence in the media to report the news ‘fully, accurately and fairly,’ similar to last year’s 32 per cent.”

Anybody who has been paying attention could have guessed that the polling showed rock-bottom (12 per cent) trust in media among Republicans, miserable 27 per cent trust among independents and majority support (54 per cent) expressed only by Democrats. Even with Democrats, trust dropped from a high of 76 per cent in 2018. A big reason is that many media outlets picked sides — mostly Democrats and the political left with a smaller faction favouring the right. That leaves allegedly “national” networks and “newspapers of record” speaking primarily to true believers.

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