Many members of the news media were blindsided by the results of the 2024 elections. Their coverage was utterly detached from the issues voters care about. The economy was treated as an afterthought among wealthy Democrats who make up most of the population of legacy media newsrooms and TV production meetings.
On the Friday before the election, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its October jobs report. A gain of 108,000 jobs had been expected, but the actual number was just 12,000. It was the worst jobs report since the pandemic. The private sector lost 28,000 jobs while government growth added 40,000 public sector employees. So, the productive sector of the economy was a shrinking employer while the unproductive sector was expanding. It was the rotten cherry on the spoiled sundae that was the economy under President Joe Biden.
Throughout liberal media, though, this jobs report was hardly a blip on the radar. There were no lamentations about Biden’s weak economy. In fact, reporters and pundits were quick to dismiss economic concerns that have rightly persisted throughout Biden’s presidency by telling voters all was well. Inflation wasn’t that bad and wages were up, news media said, regardless of whether it was true.
More voters in 2024 said their personal finances were worse than four years earlier than had said the same thing in 2008 during the Great Recession. But this did not register with political reporters. Nor did it matter to them that, in the past five years, immigrant workers made up 88% of labor force growth, with 3.6 million joining the labor force compared to just 479,000 American-born workers. Nor did it matter that electricity prices have risen 29% and meat, poultry, fish, and eggs by 21% from when Biden took office.
Left-liberal media were oblivious to all this. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough dismissed the opinion of someone who said then-candidate Donald Trump would win because the price of butter was more than $3. Mika Brzezinski, his co-host and wife, chimed in to say butter was actually $7, which Scarborough was shocked to learn. It is at least clear who buys the groceries in that relationship.
In the aftermath of Nov. 5, Scarborough and Brzezinski went to talk to Trump, who had once been their friend, in an apparent attempt to shore up their collapsing credibility by showing a degree of contrition for neglecting reality and ignoring the concerns of the public. Others were not so introspective. On Stephanie Ruhle’s MSNBC show, Eddie Glaude blamed racism for Trump’s victory, or more pointedly, for Vice President Kamala Harris’s defeat, saying voters were concerned primarily about “all these racially ambiguous children on Cheerios commercials.” When Ruhle asserted people voted for Trump because their lives were too expensive, her guest ranted that he did “not believe that.”
Why would he? Glaude, an MSNBC contributor, sits on the board of trustees for Morehouse College and is a “distinguished professor” at Princeton University. He almost certainly has not had to worry about the price of butter or other groceries during most of his adult life. He doesn’t just live in an ideological bubble in which he and like-minded colleagues celebrate his race-obsessed writings and opinions. He also lives in a financial bubble, having no evident idea what ordinary people who lack Ivy League and media positions have to do to get by in a difficult economy.
CNN is reexamining its programming as its ratings have cratered, bringing up interesting details about what life is like for a CNN anchor. Jake Tapper is reportedly under contract for an annual salary of $7 million and Wolf Blitzer for $3 million. (The well-connected liberal media outlet Puck News says the two actually “make millions more” than those numbers). Other reported CNN salaries include $3 million for Kaitlan Collins, $6 million for Erin Burnett, $8.5 million for Chris Wallace, who will be leaving the network, and $20 million for Anderson Cooper.
Cooper thus reportedly makes more money each year than NFL stars Christian McCaffrey and Travis Kelce. Cooper was born into the Vanderbilt family to millionaire parents and makes more money than most families dream of. CNN could replace all these massively expensive stars with local news anchors and see no real drop in the quality of teleprompter reading. Is it any wonder that no one at the network grasped that the economy wasn’t working for voters?
The same could be said for liberal newsrooms across the country. That is how you end up with Politico’s steady drumbeat on Biden’s “good economy,” with “robust growth” as the economy was “powering ahead.” Biden’s economy had “good metrics” but “bad vibes.” Writing for the New York Times a month before the election, Paul Krugman declared, “All the Good Economic News Vindicates Bidenomics.” That is the same Paul Krugman who got his start in academia at Yale nearly 50 years ago and signed a deal with the City University of New York in 2014 that would see him earn $225,000 for a nine-month salary without having to teach a single class.
In short, Democratic media personalities dealt with the economy by praising Biden and the numbers while dismissing voter concerns about inflation as “bad vibes.” So, the economy took a back seat in new coverage, while the focus was turned on abortion, referred to as “women’s healthcare,” or on whatever “controversy” of the day from Trump that could be depicted as a five-alarm fire.
The closing campaign storylines focused on a comedian calling Puerto Rico an island of garbage and on a Trump comment twisted beyond recognition by his critics to suggest he was suggesting former Republican congresswoman-turned-Democratic campaign surrogate Liz Cheney be shot by firing squad. Liberal media decided that these were the storylines people needed to hear as the country chose its next president.
Trump made gains among Puerto Rican voters and won a record number of Hispanic people. Cheney told women to vote their “conscience” in a “secret vote,” playing into the bizarre Democratic narrative that wives vote for Republicans only because they are scared of their husbands. Trump made gains among women voters as well. Because, as is often said, “it’s the economy, stupid.”
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That thought didn’t — perhaps couldn’t — take hold in the circles in which Democratic journalists and pundits move. It sounded great in those circles to make Harris the “change” candidate when she had been at Biden’s right hand for four years and was the tiebreaking vote on his climate spending bill that sparked record inflation. To voters, it was as insulting as the repeated lectures they received about how they should appreciate Biden’s wonderful economy.
Despite some signs of a reset from Scarborough at MSNBC and from the CNN brass, it remains to be seen if liberal media will learn their lesson. They didn’t after 2016, when forming “the Resistance” seemed more important than understanding voters who turned to Trump. The self-importance of media as “fact-checkers” and “defenders of democracy” blinded them to what life was like for 95% of Americans before, and it will almost certainly do so for another four years.