Why do media elites believe their own propaganda?

It is not conspiratorial to suggest that the Washington press corps chose to help Donald Trump win the 2024 presidential election by trying to prevent most Americans from seeing the degree to which the former president had deteriorated mentally since leaving office. 

Virtually all his public appearances and media interviews that year featured long stretches of incoherence and outright gibberish. That itself should have made for banner headlines, but it didn't. Instead a gap formed between the real (incoherent) Trump and the fake (coherent) Trump represented by the news media. That gap was so big it had a name: sanewashing. 

We are now seeing the consequences of electing a cognitively impaired president – a democracy in tatters, a country at war, an economy on the brink – but that was the risk that the owners of the country’s most lucrative media properties were willing to take. 

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The decade leading up to the 2024 election featured social and political progress for women, Black people, people of color, and the LGBTQ-plus community. The MeToo movement revealed the ugly reality of sexism. The country was rocked by a reckoning over institutional racism in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a white cop. The pandemic empowered workers in ways largely unknown. Above all that was a president, Joe Biden, who put the government on the side of labor and the consumers who drive 70 percent of the economy. 

Today, we might call it a social revolution against the Epstein class.

Which is why America’s cultural elites struck a bargain with themselves. He might be unfit mentally, and he might be dangerous politically, but it was better to have a second term for Donald Trump than a second term for a liberal administration that threatened to deepen 10 years' worth of progressive gains made in the pursuit of liberty and justice for all. 

America’s cultural elites needed a tool to stop progress. Sure, he was deranged. Sure, he was a criminal and a traitor. But the consequences of his reelection were unlikely to touch the elites while the consequences of the alternative very much would. So his liabilities were sanewashed and after he won, the press corps manufactured a consensus in which everything was going to be fine. The economy was good. Wokeness was defeated. 

But here’s the odd thing. These same elites seem to actually believe their own propaganda. They seem to believe the reelection of Trump was a correction, not only for America but for the media as well. They seem to believe that there really is a cultural bias against white people and that once this bias is corrected, the news business will reap a populist windfall. 

They’re wrong. There is no bias – anyway, not in the way they believe. That should be evident in the attempts to correct the “error” by the Post, under the ownership of Jeff Bezos, and by CBS News, under the leadership of Bari Weiss. Each has conspicuously reoriented their outfit toward the political right. The result has been a veritable bloodbath in lost revenues. 

That they are wrong is not evident to them, though. This alone is worth pondering. Many on the political left presume Bezos and Weiss are intentionally sabotaging the Post and CBS News. But, as Noah Berlatsky wrote recently, that’s more conspiracy than fact. They do want to make money. Weiss in particular, Noah said, isn’t a saboteur. She’s just a losing loser.

I got in touch with Noah to talk about this and more, because I like him and because his newsletter is so insightful. It’s called Everything Is Horrible. Here’s the rest of our chat.

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You say Bezos and the Ellisons believe remaking their outlets in the mold of Fox will make them profitable. Yet they still believe that even after they have failed. In your view, why is that?

I think very wealthy people are surrounded by yes-men and are dazzled by their own success. They think they're brilliant and if their schemes go awry, it's someone else's fault or it's a sign of their willingness to think big, take risks, etc. Admitting they screwed up and are stupid would mean questioning whether they actually deserve all that power. Obviously, they can't do that.

You suggest that Weiss and the billionaires she represents think of themselves as tribunes of an authentic America. Will business failure correct that categorical error or nah?

I think that the wealthy are very reluctant to reassess their screw-ups. However, I do think that others watching them screw up are likely to become more skeptical of the idea that Trump and his billionaire cheering squad are the voice of the people.

You've already seen this I think as institutions have become more willing to fight and less willing to knuckle under, as it's become clear that Trump is not very popular. Disney and Kimmel were one example. More universities have started to push back. Democrats have become more willing to fight, etc.

What’s happening at CBS and others reflects the growing gap between media elites and normal people. It’s to the point now where Trump can claim victory in his war against Iran, and the press corps might choose to believe him, while consumers of the news watch the war burn up their wages. Will there be a correction at some point, as there would be on Wall Street?

The press has actually been pretty skeptical about the Iran war. There's some egregious cheerleading from people like New York Times columnist Bret Stephens and other neoconservative hacks, but it's nothing like with the Iraq War. I don't think the press would just shrug and go along with it if Trump declares victory.

I think this is largely because the public is so against the war. Media elites can be disconnected, but they also do react to what their audience wants, especially when there's a lot of bipartisan consensus. A significant section of the Republican Party and right wing is very angry about the war, and that means that media outlets feel empowered to criticize it – which I think they have done, which makes the war less popular, which makes the media more willing to criticize it and so on. It's a virtuous circle.

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After the election, there was a media consensus that believed that Joe Biden was the aberration, not Trump, and that Trump, in coming back, was a restoration of normalcy. That consensus depended on Biden’s economy becoming Trump’s. Now that Trump’s economy is cratering, will the consensus change?

I'm not sure that I agree that the return of Trump was exactly seen as normal. Trump's often seen as an exciting deviation from the norm, and I think a lot of the excitement in elite circles was created by the sense of a definitive break with the past — Trump, they all believed, would crush the left rabble once and for all.

I think that the sense of fascist optimism among the elites has obviously soured. I don't know that it's useful to think of Trump as abnormal or an aberration exactly, though. He's dominated US politics for 11 years. He is the status quo. He's what America has decided to be. I think that we need to grapple seriously with the fact that overturning that status quo is going to require some sweeping changes. We aren't just going to snap back to normal when Trump is gone. This is normal, god help us.

Why do some on the left see conspiracy when Weiss and the oligarchs’ business failures are more easily explained by greed, cowardice, incompetence and the abuse of power?

I take it you mean. Why do some on the left (and not just the left!) believe that Weiss wants CBS to fail? That is, why do they think she's destroying it out of malice rather than incompetence?

I think there's a couple of things. One is that Weiss, Bezos and so forth really do want to kneecap the ability of journalists to criticize the regime. So reducing capacity and immiserating good reporters is a plus from their perspective. They want to destroy the old version of the Washington Post and CBS News, and doing so has been at least a partial win.

Second, I think there's always kind of an impulse to see your enemies as more organized, more effective and more competent than your side is. Republicans do this too. They're always talking about how Democrats are laser-focused and ruthless, etc. It's just one way that negative partisanship works.

Finally, I think people are sometimes afraid to hope? I often think about Bill Paxton in Aliens where he shouts, "Game over, man! Game over!" You wish for the end because then you can check out and don't have to live the painful bits of the end with the aliens catching and eating you. Which is understandable that you would rather miss that part! But of course if you check out and just assume the enemy is unbeatable, you aren't exploiting their weaknesses or doing what you can to defeat them.

So, yeah, I do not think that the struggle for media is over at all. Bezos and CBS have had very significant humiliations and losses. NOTUS is expanding its Washington newsroom with a lot of ex-Post staff; ABC News and NBC News have benefited and their ratings are up. The dream of a popular maga mainstream media bonanza is pretty dead, which I think leaves space open for other dreams and other approaches.

Obviously we're still all living in a nightmare. But Weiss and Ellison getting humiliated is good. Take the win when you can.