Did the media cost Harris the 2024 election?

Following Kamala Harris’ loss to president-elect Donald Trump, as to be expected, there is a lot of blame going around as to why she lost. Much of the blame centers around her running a bad campaign or making the same mistakes has Hillary made in 2016. Or maybe Trump cheated. Or perhaps she was simply unlikable and failed to resonate with voters. An overlooked explanation is that the mainstream media may also be to blame, and that the damage had already been done by the time she stepped in, not so much her campaign.

My thesis is as follows:

1. Due to poor ratings and heavy but justified criticisms of left-wing bias during Covid and the George Floyd riots, the mainstream media faced a crisis.

The NYTs and other mainstream liberal media suffered from 2018-2022 by being perceived as too ideologically biased, such as during Covid or the riots. Blaming Trump for everything was not going to work if people had grown to distrust the media in general. This led, I believe, to coverage that portrayed Democrats and Biden in a more negative light, such as endless headlines about inflation and shortages and other problems during the Biden administration, instead of the liberal media being water carriers for the Democrats, as during the entire Clinton-Trump era.

Facebook around 2018 or so had also changed its algorithms to penalize news sites. This led to a precipitous decline of outgoing Facebook traffic to news sites:

2. Facing criticism of bias, changing algorithms, and the prospect of declining relevance, the mainstream media changed its strategy to write articles that were more likely to go viral on Twitter. This meant taking a more negative view of the Biden economy and relying more on negativity in the headlines to facilitate ‘doom scrolling’, which had become increasingly popular.

3. Around mid-2021, coverage of the economy had suddenly become negative, with viral articles about a supply chain crisis, inflation, and various shortages. This coincided with Biden’s approval ratings falling from 51% to 43% between May 2021 to October 2021, indicated in red, from which it never recovered:

The keyword “shortage” spiked in May 2021, coinciding with the beginning the decline of Biden’s approval ratings:

April/May 2021 saw a flurry of coverage about a ‘chip shortage’ by the entirety of the media, including the ‘liberal media’ such as the NYTs, the Washington Post, and CNN, not just Fox News:

By July 2021, this morphed to a more generalized ‘supply chain crisis’, a shipping crisis, and the shortages of many goods, not just chips. There is even a Wikipedia entry about it, 2021–2023 global supply chain crisis.

4. Biden was never able to shake the narrative of being associated with shortages and inflation, which although true, he was never able to regain this lost support–even despite the strong performance of the stock market, strong GDP, and record-low unemployment. This could have eventually led to Kamala’s loss. As Noah Smith noted, Americans hate inflation more than they hate unemployment.

5. After arguably peaking in 2020-2021, by 2022 wokeness had suddenly become less popular. Biden, despite not being particularly woke himself, was still negatively affected and lost supporters due to being associated with it. Coverage on Twitter by center-left pundits had become negative around this time. Such centrists supported Biden as an alternative to Trump, who was disgraced following Jan 6th, but were not that enthusiastic of the Democrats either. Losing such supporters was part of the post-2022 defection I wrote about here and here. Silicon Valley, once a bastion of Democratic support, had started to defect against perceived wokeness in tech. This came after criticism of bias, such as Google’s AI intentionally censoring certain results or rewriting history to suit politically correct agendas or narratives.

Even on the left, it was hard to find anyone enthusiastic about Biden. Much of his apparent support was in opposition to Trump, not because of any his policies or leadership per se.

6. It was not Covid either. The Delta variant, the most deadly of all of the Covid variants, began on November 2020 and achieved maximum spread shortly after Biden was inaugurated, yet this did not hurt his approval ratings. His approval rating collapse occurred during the quiet period in-between the decline of Delta and the rise of the more mild Omicron variant:

Nor was it the lockdowns, as those had already been lifted for most Americans by Summer 2020. Same for the George Floyd riots and BLM protests, as those abruptly ended after the 2020 election.

7. Elon’s buyout of Twitter, which was finalized on October 27, 2022, magnified the above trends, leading to more negativity which went viral on Twitter and hurting Biden’s prospects.

8. Against all odds Trump was able to rehabilitate his image following Jan 6th and avoid any prison time or being disqualified from running. Trump defeated Ron DeSantis, who in early 2023 actually had a small lead against the former president, and easily securing the GOP nomination. DeSantis would have been an easier opponent had he been nominated.

For the first half of 2021, the January 6th protests were still fresh in voter’s minds, and coverage of Trump was extremely negative. The former President was disgraced, and hundreds of his supporters were facing criminal charges for entering the Capitol. But having all the major media publications–from the NYTs, Washington Post, NPR, and the WSJ–stop talking about Jan 6th and instead suddenly all at once talking about supply chains or shortages, took the wind out of the sails of the administration, which it was never able to recover from.

This is what I observed even as far back as November 2021. I saw that coverage by such liberal stalwarts as the NYTs and NPR was so negative about the economy. I was thinking to myself “Isn’t this supposed to be the liberal media?” From the post The Biden Freefall:

I think most of this decline can be attributed to the media turning on Biden, especially regarding the economy. The administration can no longer count on the liberal media to defend it, unlike during the Obama and Clinton years. For the past half year or so, there have been endless headlines even by left-wing sources about surging CPI, ‘the highest inflation gains in xx number of years,’ etc. All of this negativity, weeks on end, eventually eroded to some degree the public’s confidence in Biden. And of course, the right-wing media is also doing the same, so Biden has lost pretty much all media support…

I at least did not notice any shortages or other issues at the time. Grocery stores were fully in-stock, although some items were annoyingly locked away due to shoplifting, not shortages. Best Buy didn’t have any shortages for computers when I bought my new laptop on November 2021. Much of this I believe was overblown and made worse by the media’s reporting for clicks and page views, which although successful in that regard, also cost Harris the election, or at least played a non-trivial role in her loss. As James Carville candidly noted, the economy is the most important issue for Democrats, and losing the narrative on that doomed it.