Penna Dexter

It’s been a long time since conservatives expected fair and balanced coverage of elections by the legacy media. But the Left counts on traditional news outlets to tip the scales with favorable coverage of its candidates and issues.

True to form, major outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, NBC, ABC, and CBS covered the 2024 campaigns and handled debates and interviews in the biased way they always do. But in this election, the media’s failure to provide truthful and fair coverage hurt the Left.

Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel writes, “So long as the left is pointing fingers, let it direct a big, fat digit at the outfit that played the biggest role in losing it the election: the U.S. media.”

We cannot place the media in one overarching category. The Journal itself is legacy media, but its editorial page skews right. Today, Americans have numerous media outlets to choose from.

And so do candidates.

Even The Washington Post points out that “Trump and his surrogates saw incredible value in tapping into a podcast ecosystem that has large numbers of young male listeners who otherwise might have skipped casting ballots.“

Meanwhile much of the media ignored, and expected voters to ignore, border chaos, higher prices, and especially President Biden’s decline. As Kim Strassel points out: “In a world with a competent press, Mr. Biden’s failing constitution would have been front page news.” Instead, the legacy media cooperated with the Democrats in covering it up. If they had done a better job reporting on it, there would have been time to hold a primary which “would have produced a tested nominee.”

Big shock: Americans didn’t buy narratives like “we’re experiencing one of the strongest economies ever” or “crime is falling.”

First Amendment freedoms include the press because the press is meant to provide politicians with “gut checks as to how their policies sit with the nation.” Traditional news outlets face a reckoning.