The Media Hellscape Democrats Need To Do Something About

Arguing over best phrasing isn’t going to matter if we can’t find the audience for it

Having spent most of my life focused on organizing and communicating with working class voters, I am delighted to see that so many Democratic Party institutions are now discovering it is a priority. After decades of hearing about soccer moms and office park dads and suburban Republican women, upper middle income subgroups obsessed about by legions of Democratic consultants as the key swing groups that will put us over the top, to hear one Democratic super-PAC after another announce it is doing a working class project of one kind or another is welcome.

Of course, just because leading Democratic groups are suddenly focused on working class voters doesn’t mean they will all get it right. There is a lot of gobbledygook (a technical term which many political consultants are all too familiar with) out there about “the working class” from people who don’t know anything about what working families are going through every day.

But even if all these working class projects get things right, and Democrats start talking a better game on reaching regular folks, the million dollar question: where and how does this great new message get delivered?

3300 local newspapers have closed down in the last 10 years, and the ones managing to survive have cut way back on their reporting steff. Most local radio stations have been bought by national media chains, so they rarely deliver any local news. More than half of local TV news stations are now owned by Sinclair Broadcasting or other far right media chains. Meanwhile, the numbers of news consumers keeps going down, and people are trusting traditional news sources less and less – which makes sense given the decline in coverage and obvious bias in those sources.

So where are people turning to for their news? Many of them aren’t turning anywhere. Back when a lot of people subscribed to newspapers, it wasn’t necessarily for the news, at least not political or issue news. The main reason many folks got newspapers was because of crossword puzzles, or recipes, sports, celebrity gossip, or TV listings. Those folks getting papers for other reasons glanced at the headlines on the front page but didn't usually read the articles in detail. Now that all those other things are widely available on the internet, lots of people aren’t getting much hard news. The right wing has figured this out, by the way, which is why they are spending so many resources investing in sports and entertainment and the rest of the non-political kinds of news people are actually consuming.

There’s another factor as well, which is hitting Democrats especially hard right now: when the news is so ugly, people don’t want to pay attention to it. One of the reasons Trump and his band of nasties like mucking around in so much personal ugliness is that they want people to be so disgusted with politics that they stop paying attention – because according to the latest trends, the less news you consume, the more likely you are to vote Republican.

We are the news

What news most people do get these days comes increasingly from social media, which is dominated by a right wing media social infrastructure far ahead of, and far better funded than, what our side offers. The thing that makes social media so powerful is that it comes from sources people trust – friends, relatives, people in your community, and sites you have chosen to follow. Right wing donors and strategists get this, and have invested tens of millions of dollars a year into this infrastructure.

What Democrats and progressive activists need to understand is that we need to create our own media infrastructure. In the age of social media, we are the news. We need to be the ones building our own social media sites, engaging with friends and family and people in our neighborhoods and communities. As a party and progressive movement, we need to be building a social media infrastructure that goes into the counties, towns, and neighborhoods we aren’t engaging with right now.

Nobody understands how the media landscape has changed, and what Democrats need to do about it, better than my old friend Will Robinson. After being involved in labor politics, presidential politics, and at the DNC, Will became a media consultant. He quickly figured out that the way his industry was making all their money – i.e. buying lots of TV ads on broadcast TV channels –was not the way to win elections, because people were turning away from broadcast TV, and moving toward cable (back in the ‘90s), and then digital and then streaming and social media.

Will lays out in the Substacks below the nature of the current media landscape, and how Democrats have blown it by not getting how things are changing. I highly recommend reading his entire three part series, but I’ll give you what I think is the money quote:

“Here’s the hard truth: The left doesn’t just have a media problem - we have a media infrastructure problem. The right has spent decades building an emotionally resonant, participatory, always-on ecosystem that feeds outrage, identity, and belonging. More importantly, Trump and the Republican Party will pluck ideas from this ecosystem and operationalize it, which reinforces the power and relevance of said ecosystem (e.g. Laura Loomer’s National Security Council purge) The left, by contrast, builds seasonal ad campaigns, comms teams with long approval chains, and institutions built for broadcast - not conversation. We invest in think tanks, not meme pages. We still buy time on platforms people stopped watching five years ago. If we want to win hearts, minds, and votes, we need more than facts. We need emotional connection. We need scale. And we need narrative power.”

Part 1: How the Right Won the Media War — And What We Can Still Do About It

Part 2: The Firehose of Falsehood — How the Right Weaponized the Media Gap

Part 3: How We Fight Back — Building a Media Ecosystem to Meet the Moment

Do Democrats need better messaging, focused on working class voters? Hell, yes.

But our urgent crying need right now is building the kind of media infrastructure Will Robinson writes about in his Substack columns.