The Collapse of the Mainstream Media (Part 2)

Part 2: The 2020 Election

This series will cover how a freefall of public trust in the face of spin and censorship has led to the rise of new and independent media. It will investigate how Russiagate (part 1), the 2020 presidential election (part 2), and COVID (part 3) specifically have eroded trust in legacy media and then analyze the growth of other sources.

Russiagate, COVID, and the 2020 election summoned a perfect storm of misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda. However, as much as mainstream media assets and the political class wanted to blame the chaos on the Kremlin, neo-McCarthyist narratives don’t tell the full story.

The Knight Foundation, in partnership with Gallup, conducted surveys both before and after the 2020 presidential election. The Knight studies measured, among other things, America’s trust in the media. When asked “how responsible do you think the news media overall was in its reporting of the election results,” Americans found:

The coverage of Biden’s campaign was significantly more fair than coverage of Trump’s campaign, 74% to 55% respectively. The difference is mostly accounted for by a 40 point gap in Republicans’ opinions of the two campaigns–53% say media coverage of Biden was fair, but only 13% say the same about Trump’s campaign.”

That 40 point gap reveals a big problem. Republicans, historically, trust the media less than Democrats. But why the pronounced gap in 2020 and the subsequent collapse of so many mainstream media outlets (as reported last week)?

A cumulative postmortem would have to take into account the Russiagate scandal, the systemic censorship of conservative voices in the leadup to the election (as reported by Fox News), the blackout of independent voices during that same time, and the general misinformation and anxiety from the COVID pandemic (more on COVID next week).

To be sure, one cannot separate the pandemic from the 2020 election and Russiagate. The arch institutional narrative was the same in all three contexts: Donald Trump is the enemy. Trump was the traitor in Russiagate as well as in the leadup to the 2020 election, and he was supposedly the murderer due to his negligence during the early days of COVID.

However, within this long narrative arc of demonization (or Trump Derangement Syndrome), one particular event from the 2020 race between Trump and Biden clarifies a dominant dynamic in the mainstream media’s disinformation campaign. The story of Hunter Biden’s laptop reveals that the media’s problem with trust cannot be easily blamed on Russia or foreign interference, and should instead be focused on forces closer to home.

In the final months of the 2020 election, Trump argued that Biden’s family was corrupt and that the evidence for this claim was corroborated by the personal and business files evident on Biden’s son, Hunter’s, leaked laptop hard drive. On October 19, 2020 – 15 days before the election – at the behest of Antony Blinken (now Secretary of State), 51 former intelligence officers signed a letter that discredited the Hunter Biden laptop data as potential Russian disinformation, as reported by Politico.

Three days after the publication of the letter, which was signed by former NSA Director, James Clapper, Biden referred to the missive in a speech, saying, “there are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what [Trump is] accusing me of is a Russian plan,” as reported by the Wall Street Journal. Shortly after, Twitter blocked users from sharing a New York Post story about the laptop, as reported by the Washington Post.

Thus, this letter from intelligence operatives effectively vindicated Biden’s conspiracy theory and delegitimized the Republican argument, as well as the contents of Biden’s laptop on social media, which was not only echoed, but magnified, by reporting from the legacy media. On November 3, Biden defeated Trump with a narrow victory in the key swing states of Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. Collectively, Biden won those states with a margin of fewer than 43,000 votes.

Now fast-forward to 2023 when Congress learned from IRS supervisory agent, Gary Shapley, that the FBI verified the authenticity of the Hunter Biden laptop as far back as 2019. This claim of authenticity was affirmed by the forensic examination of former Secret Service agent, Konstanino Dimetrelos in 2023, as reported by the Washington Examiner, and raises a host of questions: Did the intelligence community interfere in the 2020 election by publicly staking their credibility on this neo-McCarthyist narrative of Russian disinformation? Furthermore, what are the costs of this revelation to a public that was incessantly scolded by the mainstream media for questioning the integrity of the 2020 election?

Honest Media is not the first organization to document the Hunter Biden laptop story as a contributing cause to the public’s plummeting trust in traditional media. The Wall Street Journal has also reported on this incendiary event and its relationship to patterns of media trust. Furthermore, the emerging evidence that this was a flashpoint in a larger trend is corroborated by longitudinal data sets from across the media. 

In a report released just after the 2020 election, Pew Research described a clear partisan divide. Pew noted that “evidence suggests that partisan polarization in the use and trust of media sources has widened in the past five years.” Specifically, for instance, the data reveals that Republican leaning viewers’ trust in NBC sits at 30% in 2020, whereas the trust factor is 60% for Democrat leaning viewers. These numbers are in stark contrast to Pew’s findings from its 2014 study of trust in the media. 

We at Honest Media do not want to practice the deceit we see elsewhere. We do not believe in easy answers to complex questions. We do not think one can blame the collapse of the mainstream media on just Russiagate or the 2020 election, or any one single issue within these two contexts, such as the Hunter Biden laptop. Like Vijaya Gadde, the former legal officer for Twitter, we think it’s now abundantly clear that the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story was a mistake that cost the media dearly, as reported by CNN.

Nevertheless, the legacy media’s handling of the 2020 election clearly had consequences and has indeed eroded trust in official narratives. It was one of numerous factors in this history of compromised credibility.

In order to fully comprehend the deeper data trend that maps the collapse of the mainstream media, one must study, collectively, Russiagate, the 2020 election, and the most significant American censorship event of the 21st century: the COVID pandemic, which will come next week.