In the early hours of Wednesday morning, legacy news networks were already sliding toward 2016 levels of melting down about the increasingly definite prospect of a presidential victory by Donald J. Trump. For them, Harris’ stinging defeat is personal — because it’s just as much a defeat for them as it is for her.
The corporate media industrial complex has spent Donald Trump’s entire political career trying to destroy him. Hand-in-hand with triple-letter government agencies and Democrats, they ran a hoax painting Trump as a Russian stooge based on ridiculous rumors commissioned by his opponent’s campaign in 2016. They continued to spread the lie for the duration of his presidency, awarding each other Pulitzers for it. And they’ve only ramped up their efforts since then.
The problem they’re reckoning with tonight is this: those efforts didn’t work. They’re no longer able to control Americans by controlling their information intake, because their credibility is farther deep-sixed than the Clinton family’s enemies list.
A TV executive anonymously fretted last week that “If half the country has decided that Trump is qualified to be president, that means they’re not reading any of this media, and we’ve lost this audience completely. A Trump victory means mainstream media is dead in its current form.”
Even before the election results were in, that was true of the corporate press. Jeff Bezos knew it when he reportedly ordered The Washington Post to withhold an endorsement of Harris. But now, they can’t avoid it.
Since the last presidential election, the media have screeched incessantly about Trump “inciting an insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. They made documentaries comparing Trump to the Ku Klux Klan. They portrayed Trump as the ringleader of a terrorist attack and not as a president who gave a speech and urged his supporters to protest peacefully.
Tuesday night’s results are a resounding indication that Americans didn’t buy it.
With help from a debunked story planted in The Atlantic, the media made Trump out to be a “fascist” and routinely compared him to Hitler. When Trump held a gangbusters rally at Madison Square Garden, they screeched that he and his supporters were obviously Nazis because they gathered at the same venue that Nazi sympathizers once rented — along with Frank Sinatra, the Rolling Stones, Elton John, Billy Joel, Beyoncé, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter.
They called him a threat to democracy and said he would be a dictator. That didn’t work either.
Hellbound and Down 