Taking Stock of My Media Diet
When Kamala Harris entered the presidential race, I wrote it represented a return to normalcy. I believed that’s what Americans desired, a candidate who could put a sentence together and would more or less maintain the status quo. I assumed people were ready to get off the roller coaster. I know I was. I’m not surprised Donald Trump won, the Electoral College is a flawed system, that can produce flawed results. I am surprised that he won the popular vote though. I did not see that coming. Why not? The answer is my media diet…but we’ll get back to that.
I once wrote an article examining why recent presidential elections have become so close. Even the “red wave” of 2024 will likely have a popular vote margin of around 2%; we’ll see where it lands. It wasn't always like this. Back in the 1900s, 20 out of 25 presidential elections were decided by a popular vote of 5% or more. Ten of those were decided by margins of over 15% of the popular vote. These were blowouts! And it wasn’t one side or the other. In 1964 Lydon Johnson, a Democrat, won 44 states. Two election cycles later Richard Nixon, a Republican, won 49 states. Imagine Trump winning 44 states in 2016 and Harris winning 49 in 2024. You can’t, it’s impossible.
In that article, I argued elections have tightened due to income inequality. I stand by that. We indeed have tight presidential elections in periods of high income inequality. But there’s something else happening too. In Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point, he talks about a time when the biggest indicator of how a person regarded an issue wasn’t political affiliation, it was how much TV they watched. How a person felt about interracial marriage, for example, had little to do with conservative versus liberal, it was based on whether or not you watched The Jeffersons. In other words, monoculture ruled all.
A.I. algorithms and the financial incentives that accompany them have created a world void of monoculture. My media diet leading up to the election consisted of YouTubers reinforcing my beliefs and every time I watched one of those videos YouTube was happy to offer up five more. I don’t pay attention to Joe Rogan, watch UFC, or listen to country music. These are not the cultural touchstones for me they are for other people. That’s not to say that identifying with those things means you robotically vote one way or the other but it is to say, that person’s social media algorithm would be much different than mine. That person, regardless of how they voted, saw this coming. It’s easy to relegate segments of our culture when you’re never forced to engage them.
It goes beyond my digital bubble though. I live in California. The people I spend most of my time with, lean left. I was on a camping trip recently and someone made a mildly political remark. Another person looked around cautiously and said, “We’re all Harris people, right?”, everyone nodded. We didn’t spend the rest of the trip stroking our beards agreeing the proletariat should own the means of production. We drank beer, grilled steak, and bullshitted about our lives, like all good Americans.
Does that mean if I had a different media diet, I would support Trump? No. I think we are in for four historically brutal years. The only question is how bad will it be? Authors Note: I tried to write a short synopsis of all the ways we could be fucked in the next four years here (and beyond) but it was impossible to put into a few short sentences and allow for some nuance. Maybe I’ll write about that another time. But make no mistake about it, we are fucked, the question is how hard and for how long.
But I already know what Trump is, that’s not the point of the piece. I have been insufficiently curious about the people who support him. I feel that to engage in a debate you should understand the other side's position as well as you understand your own and I haven’t been living up to that. Despite the rhetoric I don’t think voters on the “other side” are evil or nefarious. I think they’re being fed the same calamitous diet as I am but from an opposite perspective. Does that mean I’m going to start listening to Joe Rogan and hang a set of rubber testicles from the back of my truck? No, but what I can do is get away from the leftist cotton candy I have come to regularly ingest and find ways to have a more objective, better informed media diet.
Or maybe just watch cat videos.
