‘They’ve Learned Nothing’: The Legacy Media’s Blind Spots And Trump’s Triumph

The following is an edited transcript of an interview between Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley and Wall Street Journal Editor-at-Large Gerard Baker on a Saturday edition of Morning Wire.

* * *

The post-mortems of Donald Trump’s landslide presidential win have been painful not just for the Democrats but also for the legacy media, which spent so much of its cultural and reputational capital on trying to keep him out of office. With trust in the media at an all-time low, a growing number of outlets are announcing major shakeups and layoffs. Morning Wire sat down with the Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker to discuss what the legacy media has failed to learn from the Trump phenomenon and where it goes from here.

* * *

JOHN: Joining us now is Gerard Baker, editor-at-large for the Wall Street Journal. Gerard, thank you so much for coming on, a real delight to talk with you.

GERARD: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

JOHN: You recently wrote an Op-Ed that received a lot of attention. It’s a response to Trump’s landslide win and it really shames the legacy media for how it covered this election. The title is “2024 Election Shows the Media Learned Nothing from 2016.” What lessons did the media fail to learn?

GERARD: Well, if you recall, after the shock of the 2016 election, when Donald Trump won despite the media telling us there was virtually no chance of that happening — we had those famous probability indicators saying that Hillary Clinton had a 90% chance of winning — the shock that so many American media companies discovered, that there were so many people in this country who wanted to vote for Donald Trump, even though the media companies didn’t know it. You recall that after that shock, there was a bit of soul searching, at least a little bit of public soul searching, on the part of some of the media companies. They said, “Look, we really need to understand the country better. Maybe, there are people out there whose views we aren’t capturing, whose views we don’t understand, and we’re going to try and do a better job of that.” The editor of the New York Times at the time said that was one of his priorities after 2016, to know more about the country. Well, they kind of went forth in the manner of some sort of 19th century anthropologists venturing into darkest Africa to discover who these people were who voted for Trump. They presumably found them and then we didn’t really hear very much more from them except when we got to the election campaign of 2024 and we were told by so many of these media organizations that Trump supporters were a lot of fascists. It’s one thing to be sort of surprised and shocked the first time, but when eight years later Trump wins again — and this time with more votes, with a higher share of the vote, and undisputed election — you wonder what have those media organizations been doing for the last eight years? And, as I say, we know what they’ve been doing. They’ve been essentially carrying on this extended campaign of vilification of Donald Trump. And look, there are lots and lots and lots of things to criticize about Donald Trump. I’m not here to say he’s the greatest man who ever lived, but, the continued willful failure to even try to understand what it is that animates so many Americans. To vote for Donald Trump, to vote against the Democrats, but to vote against really the political establishment, that failure by the media is a staggering failure. And it just suggests what we kind of all suspected all along — that they’ve learned nothing and they frankly know very, very little about a very, very large proportion of the population of this country.

JOHN: Looking at the electoral map, it’s stunning to see the amount of red. This isn’t something new, but the degree to which the red predominates is new over the last few decades. It is overwhelming. And you can see the idea of the bubble playing out geographically. Is it that the media is in these traditional bubbles of little east and west coast enclaves, and they do not venture into red parts of the country? Is that what’s happening here?

GERARD: It’s partly that, for sure. This has been a longstanding phenomenon. Anybody who’s worked in the American media, certainly for as long as I have, the major journalists, the major reporters and editors at the main news organizations, the big newspapers or television networks, or increasingly even the digital operations we have now, they’re drawn from a pretty narrow swath of the country, both geographically and demographically. They tend to be quite highly educated, and essentially from the coasts and they frankly don’t have any experience with the rest of the country. They don’t know anybody in the rest of the country. One of the interesting exercises you can always do with a bunch of journalists is ask them how many of them voted for Donald Trump in this election or previous elections. You won’t see many hands go up. But then ask them how many of them know anyone who voted for Donald Trump. And you’ll see no hands go up either. They don’t move in circles, either socially or indeed even professionally, in an attempt to understand who these voters are. That’s been a phenomenon certainly since Trump came onto the scene 10 years ago. But what’s even more interesting is what we’ve seen in this election. You’re absolutely right about the redness of the American electoral map. But what, Disguises is that what we saw in this election was actually really significant gains for Trump and for the Republicans in some of these places where these journalists are concentrated. We have seen this remarkable phenomenon — big gains for Trump compared with 2020 in places like New York City and Chicago and San Francisco and L.A. So this phenomenon we’ve seen, what we used to think of as the white working class, for want of a better term, who were voting Republican in increasing numbers over the last 10 years, that’s now spread to ethnic minority members in particular. Again, ethnic minority working class people living in these big cities who are fed up with the way these cities are governed, fed up by the way in which the democratic parties essentially abandon them. Again, it’s one thing to not go out to darkest Kansas and interview people in Lawrence or Topeka to find out what they’re thinking, it’s another thing entirely to be sitting in an office building in Manhattan and not realize that people across the East River in Queens are also turning towards Donald Trump and voting in numbers and not begin to understand why that is.

JOHN: We saw the lid blow off of this fear of openly supporting Trump this go around – Elon Musk and some other major figures helped make that happen. But I would be surprised in these really deep blue areas if people felt that they could openly speak about their support of Trump. Now, I want to talk about the “fascist” label of Trump. This was astonishing to me, the degree of partisanship within the legacy media – it was more extreme than we’ve ever seen. Trump being described as an actual fascist, as the next Hitler, despite his four years as a successful president, not being an authoritarian. And, by extension, the description of anybody who supports Trump as a fascist. Has the media officially jumped the shark? How much farther could it go in terms of partisanship than what we just witnessed?

GERARD: Look, the media will say in response to that question, and indeed I’ve heard them say it, is, “Look, it’s not us calling Donald Trump a fascist, it’s people who work with him. It’s General John Kelly who worked as his Chief of Staff and Secretary of Homeland Security; it’s Mark Milley who was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when Trump was President.” They pick out those two people. I think they are the only two people who’ve really made that accusation. But, of course, we know that they’re using them as convenient weapons with which to bash Trump. And yes, to broadly characterize him as a fascist — as I wrote in my column this week, and as you just said — it’s a kind of a weird sort of fascism that gets the support of 45% of hispanic voters, 21% of black male voters, and a significantly higher proportion than last time, when he presumably wasn’t a fascist, of Jewish voters. I’ve not heard of many Jewish fascists in this country or anywhere else in the world. And it seems to me, again, that’s just a reflection of just how little the media not only don’t understand the Trump phenomenon, but have no interest in trying to understand it. For them, they all come from similar sort of social and demographic and intellectual backgrounds, they all have this monolithic view of Trump because of the way he behaved after the last election or because he has an authoritarian streak, which is probably true. But a lot of it comes down to the idea that somehow he is racist, that he believes in some sort of of white supremacy, that he believes in sort of racial hierarchies. And, after all, that tends to be one of the most important things we think of when we think of fascism. The evidence from large numbers of people voting for him, however, is that voters don’t see it that way. Voters don’t see him as racially exclusionary. They see him as someone who actually stands up for them whatever the color of their skin, whatever their background. The media has just failed to understand that.

JOHN: Poll after poll shows trust in media at an all-time low. Gallup found it’s now the lowest of all the major political and public institutions in terms of trust, lower than Congress. What went wrong? We obviously have the Trump phenomenon, but where did this start? How did things start to unravel so much for the media in terms of its credibility with the public?

GERARD: Well, I wrote a book about trust last year and the media was a large part of the decline in trust. I think there were a couple of main reasons for this. Firstly, those of us of a certain generation like mine have always been familiar with media bias. There’s always been a kind of an in-built, left-of-center bias in the media going right back to the glory days of television news like Walter Cronkite in the 60s and 70s. Well, Cronkite was a kind of an old fashioned liberal, who sometimes let his slip show, as it were. So there’s always been that bias, whether in the New York Times or the mainstream media. But a couple of things I think have really accelerated it in the last couple of decades. One, is the changing nature of the people who go into journalism. From at least up until the 1960s, 70s, maybe even 80s, journalism used to be not really even a profession, but a trade into which people, who weren’t necessarily so expensively educated, many of them didn’t have college degrees, they just had a hunger to find the truth. They wanted to go out, starting off on the local beat, finding out what crimes had happened where they lived the night before or what sort of corruption was going on in the local government. That was their background, that’s what they were steeped in. They had an interest in getting “just the facts,” as it were. Then, beginning in the 80s, 90s, and then we’re really coming to fruition with this now, we have a class of journalists who have been to very expensive, very elite colleges, many of them with post graduate degrees. Journalism, in the last 50 years, has become something that many news organizations require a post graduate degree. For those people, it wasn’t enough for them to just go and find out what was going on, they wanted to tell people how to think. They were full of ideas. And given where they went and what their backgrounds were, they tended to have ideas that were to the Left-of-center. So I think journalism became a business practiced increasingly by ideological activists as much by people who simply wanted to report. The other phenomenon that has really has accelerated this process in the last 10 years is the changes to the news business. The news business, especially the newspapers, used to be dependent almost entirely on advertising until the internet came along. Advertising was the basis of their revenue — 80 to 90% of their revenue. When the internet came along, all that advertising went away to digital properties, particularly the big ones like Google and Facebook, but smaller ones too, and the business model was essentially destroyed. Newspapers, those that were going to survive, had to find a way of replacing that lost income from advertising and they went for subscriptions. The bulk of their revenues, as you now know, from the New York Times and other papers is now subscription. And what that means is it makes the papers required to be much more tuned to their readership than they were in the days of advertising. Advertisers didn’t really much care. They weren’t trying to push a particular political line, they just wanted as many eyeballs as they could get. What you now have are people who have to part with $200 a year, maybe, to get a news product and they have strong views about what they want. That tends to create an incentive for the news organization to go after sections of the audience that kind of cohere around a particular world view. The Washington Post is a perfect example of this. Look at what happened a few weeks ago when the Washington Post’s editorial board did not endorse a candidate, as they famously had a furor and supposedly, the reports say, lost 250,000 subscribers in a kind of a protest. That shows these newspapers have become incredibly sensitive to the political views of their subscribers, of the people who pay for their journalism. So, you’ve had this tendency towards partisanship, particularly towards the Left, but in both the supply-side and the demand-side of the equation. Both the supply-side of the equation, that is, you’ve created this class of people who are essentially ideologues working for newspapers, and the demand-side of the equation, which is people who seek out news that comports with their political viewpoint and are willing to pay a subscription in order to get that news.

JOHN: Well, it makes perfect sense. You would hope that the mediating factor here might be that if you misinform your audience, especially the loyal ones, and they realize that you’ve misinformed them over time, then you’re going to lose them anyway. Hopefully you want the truth to be central to what you actually provide in terms of content. Look, we’ve seen several outlets in the 11th hour of the election choose not to endorse a candidate. Some are now announcing major shake-ups. There’s going to be some pretty deep staff cuts. Do you believe we’re about to see genuine moderation toward the center here from some of these leftwing outlets?

GERARD: No, I don’t, bluntly. Look, again, I think they’ll go through a little bit of the soul searching they went through in 2016. But I think the die is cast or — sorry to complicate my metaphors — but that horse has bolted from the stable. The staff of these news organizations are just so monolithically Left-of-center — not just Left-of-center, but committed in a kind of an activist way — that I don’t really see that unwinding. It’ll be really interesting to see what Jeff Bezos is able to do at The Washington Post. He does seem to be intent on appealing to a wider audience beyond the  progressive audience that it seems to be appealing to now. The same with the L.A. Times. Look, I’m a great believer in the market here, and please forgive me for sounding like I’m toying with you, but your own publication is a good example of where you discover there’s an opportunity in the market. People are tired of the same sort of political bias in news, and so they look for other news organizations. Now the barriers to entry are so low in the digital world, to get into that space, that you can do things like The Daily Wire or some of these other news platforms that have grown up very, very successfully and very effectively. So, I think the market will actually, A) develop new platforms and new products, and B) in the process, might actually force the owners of these media properties — like the LA Times and The Washington Post — to say, not only do I think it’s right that we should be more balanced and that we should appeal to more readers, but actually I think it’s in our business interest that we should too. So, I don’t think the staff are going to change. I don’t think there’s going to be any kind of internal reckoning in these news organizations to try to make them more objective. But it might just be that market pressure may drive them in that direction.

JOHN: We can hope. Gerard, thank you so much for talking with us.

GERARD: Terrific. Thank you very much indeed.

JOHN: That was Gerard Baker, Editor-at-Large at The Wall Street Journal – and this has been a Saturday edition of Morning Wire. 

***