[Editor’s Note: This article has been adapted from Sarah Longwell’s new book, How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time, which lays out the definitive playbook for how Democrats can beat the MAGA movement and reverse the country’s slide into authoritarianism.
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Democrats → adapt → authoritarianism
You can order your copy here.
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You → order → copy
]
THERE ARE A MILLION FACTORS contributing to Americans’ decisions to sort themselves, en masse, into two highly polarized factions perpetually at war with one another: geographic sorting, education stratification, big institutional failures that shattered the public’s trust, bewildering technological changes, the loss of those “little platoons” that Edmund Burke wrote about that were once so influential in binding us together.
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that → be → us
But I think one of the biggest—and still most underdiscussed—storylines of how we got here is the wholesale transformation of the media ecosystem.
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we → think → ecosystem
By which I mean the way that Americans get their information about the world, and then use that information to make decisions about what kind of society they want to live in, who gets to be part of it, and who gets to wield power.
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who → mean → power
To understand the Trump era, you have to understand this first.
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you → understand → this
The decade spanning 2015 to 2025 will likely be recorded by historians as the era of the “Great Media Unraveling,” a period when the unified broadcasting models of the twentieth century shattered into distinct, self-sustaining, and mostly not-overlapping digital ecosystems.
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models → span → ecosystems
I think the next ten to twenty years will be about how that fractured media environment reconstitutes itself with a host of new media players.
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environment → think → players
When I was coming up in the conservative movement, one of the hallmarks of Republican grievance was the belief that the “mainstream media” was controlled by liberals and had a systemic bias against conservatives.
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media → come → conservatives
The political and cultural right responded to this imbalance by building an industry designed to reduce public trust in mainstream media—hammering the “liberal bias” narrative relentlessly.
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right → respond → narrative
But they didn’t stop there.
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they → stop → ?
They also built an entire competing media ecosystem.
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They → build → ecosystem
And they had a roughly fifteen-year head start on doing it.
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they → have → it
By the time Trump arrived in 2015, the infrastructure was already firmly in place.
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infrastructure → arrive → place
And below that, a vast network of podcasters, YouTubers, and talk-radio hosts who had been cultivating audiences for years.
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who → cultivate → years
When I look at the podcast charts today, the asymmetry is staggering.
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asymmetry → look → charts
Among the top political podcasts, right-wing podcasts generally outperform liberal ones (Tim Miller excepted, of course).
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Miller → outperform → course
And it’s not just that there are more of them.
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it → ’ → them
It’s that their audiences consume their content differently.
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audiences → ’ → content
Plenty of right-wing listeners use these shows as their primary news source.
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Plenty → use → source
They’re not listening to Ben Shapiro for his “take” on news they already consumed elsewhere.
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they → listen → news
They’re listening to Ben Shapiro to find out what’s happening in the world in the first place.
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what → listen → place
It’s a replacement for mainstream media, not a supplement to it.
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It → ’ → it
And now the landscape is shifting again, in ways that should alarm everyone who cares about a free press and its role in American democracy.
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who → shift → democracy
The tech oligarchs who built our dominant social media platforms—the distribution mechanisms where people go to discuss politics—are consolidating power in ways that are explicitly hostile to old-media ethics like rigorous fact-checking, fidelity to the truth, and avoidance of partisanship.
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that → build → partisanship
Americans can’t rely on mainstream media to hold the lines of democracy anymore.
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Americans → rely → democracy
Not because mainstream media is bad, but because it’s actively being captured, or hollowed out, or reconfigured by people who do not share its traditional mission.
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who → capture → mission
As I write, Trump’s allies are busy buying or selling out traditional media companies like CBS, CNN, and the Washington Post, as well as the platforms that distribute content, like TikTok, X, and Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram).
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which → write → Facebook
This, more than any other, is the development that keeps me awake at night.
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that → keep → night
IT’S A PHRASE I HEAR CONSTANTLY, across different focus groups, different years, different demographics: “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”
Not “I don’t trust CNN” or “I don’t trust Fox News.”
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I → ’ → News
It’s “I don’t know what to believe” or “I don’t know who to trust.”
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I → ’ → who
Quotes from MAGA base voters not trusting the lamestream media have been a dime a dozen since I started doing focus groups.
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I → trust → groups
But here’s a sampling from people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020.
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who → ’ → 2020
Thomas, who flipped from Biden to Trump: “It’s really hard to find truth in anything, because you can read two different news articles from two different places, and it could be about the same issue, but literally, they’re talking about two different things.”
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they → flip → things
Lisa, a Biden voter who sat out 2024, said she didn’t trust “any” news source.
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she → sit → source
“What I find myself doing is just going to a lot of sources, realizing that one’s far left, one’s far right, the truth is somewhere in the middle.”
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truth → find → middle
Then she added: “I really struggle with where to get information, and that’s why sometimes I just forgo reading anything at all.”
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I → add → anything
In a July 2024 group, as Joe Biden was under pressure to drop out of the race, Rochelle, who’d voted for Biden as well as for Hillary Clinton, said she was having some “trust issues” with the media.
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she → drop → media
“I’ve always trusted CNN.
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I → trust → CNN
I’ve always trusted the non-Fox channels,” she said.
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she → trust → channels
…and 107 more, not listed.
