Left’s break with ‘legacy’ media
TGIT. Here’s the latest on Mark Zuckerberg, Disney’s FCC fight, Alex Jones, Elon Musk, HuffPost, Byron Allen, “The Walking Dead,” BTS and more…
The most consequential disconnect in American media today is the disconnect between left-wing voters and the “legacy” media.
The dynamic on the other side, with a right-wing audience that has gravitated to Fox News and a great number of copycats, is well understood and accepted.
But a version of it is newly happening on the left, as progressives lose trust in news outlets and place their faith in individual creators instead.
I see it every day on Bluesky and Instagram: Commenters who say they don’t feel represented, don’t feel their views are reflected by mainstream sources.
Ali Swenson interviewed some of them for this excellent new AP story. Progressives are “turning to a widening mix of independent podcasts, social media accounts and digital news sites,” she wrote.
The distrust has been building over time. In 2016 and 2020, many younger left-leaning voters accused mainstream outlets of favoring establishment candidates like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden over Bernie Sanders.
What’s different now is the Substack of it all — the proliferation of tools, platforms and marketing vehicles for upstart podcasts, newsletters and TikTok channels reflecting left-leaning frustrations and affirming political beliefs.
Swenson says this new lefty media ecosystem “has boosted this year’s wave of anti-establishment, left-leaning candidates who may not have gotten as much attention otherwise,” citing Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign for Senate in Michigan as an example.
“I think in a lot of ways, where traditional media has been gatekeepers, we’re watching that gatekeeping function fall away,” El-Sayed told her…
A lot of this has to do with President Trump, of course, and the impossibility of covering the Trump era in a way that seems accurate to all sides.
Trump’s “fake news” rhetoric, originally meant to inoculate his base against bad-but-true news, has now seeped deep into the proverbial water supply.
And longtime news consumers who oppose Trump sense undue restraint on the part of the press corps during Trump 2.0 — not necessarily in the reporting, which has been thorough and often aggravating to the president, but in the tone.
I noticed this in an email exchange with a reader who said the press is wrong to call the new Air Force One a “gift” from Qatar because it’s obviously a “bribe.”
Events like the White House Correspondents’ Dinner underline how some reporters have tried to preserve norms in a decidedly abnormal time. I believe they have good, sincere reasons for doing so. But the liberal Substacker Brian Beutler wrote this morning that the dinner with Trump was “an affront to the free people in this country resisting authoritarianism.”
Every instance of perceived schmoozing, of White House fence-mending, of corporate media capitulation, doubles as an ad for the opinionated alternative press. Figures like Marc Elias run the ads constantly. “I would never eat dinner with Donald Trump… I founded Democracy Docket to never back down or obey,” Elias told followers yesterday.
While Democrats are still more likely than Republicans to express trust in the news media, trust levels among Democrats are at record lows, according to Gallup. And there is a “clear generational divide,” Gallup says, as younger Democrats are far more skeptical than their parents and grandparents.
Reece Peck, a College of Staten Island media culture professor, said to Swenson, “The ground has been made fertile for an anti-establishment media politics, where it just wasn’t quite there with the voter base in those previous cycles.” Even older, moderate liberals, Peck said, have started to “throw their hands in the air and look for alternatives.”
By the way, this morning’s new CNN poll reflects the growing anti-establishment mentality on the left. “Nearly 6 in 10 Democratic-aligned adults say their party needs at least major changes, if not complete reform,” CNN’s Jennifer Agiesta and Ariel Edwards-Levy report.
And a third of Democrats now identify as democratic socialists. If you want to understand the “ascent” of democratic socialist candidates, I highly recommend this historical assessment by the NYT’s Jia Lynn Yang, who said socialist arguments have an opening “because of dissatisfaction not just with the economy but also with Democratic leaders.”
Mark Zuckerberg announced several milestones on Meta’s earnings call last night: “Instagram reached 2 billion daily actives. Threads crossed 500 million monthly actives, making it the fastest-growing conversation app ever.” And WhatsApp “just hit an all-time messaging record, peaking at 30 million messages sent per second during the World Cup Final.”
Meta shares were hammered overnight, for unrelated reasons, after missing Wall Street earnings estimates. Meta also “reported the lowest free cash flow in years, a sign of ballooning expenses for AI bets,” Bloomberg’s Alexandra S. Levine reports.
Nevertheless, every new user milestone at Instagram or YouTube or X is a reminder about who’s in the drivers’ seat right now…
>> Speaking of earnings, Amazon, Apple, Reddit and Live Nation will all publish their Q2 report cards after the bell today.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is holding a hearing this morning to consider three nominees, including State Department official Sarah Rogers’ nomination to lead the US Agency for Global Media on top of her current duties. USAGM remains mostly frozen — the VOA website hasn’t been touched since March 2025 — but Rogers represents a shift away from the Kari Lake approach.
Ahead of the hearing, Reporters Without Borders exec Clayton Weimers warned that “bringing US international media under closer State Department control would undermine its credibility and hand authoritarian regimes a propaganda victory.” Here’s his op-ed for The National Interest…
As the conflict widens in the Middle East, and the US renews strikes in Iran, the Pentagon continues to refuse to hold press briefings to tell the public what’s going on.
Zeteo’s Asawin Suebsaeng is out with a new column saying some Trump advisers “desperately want Trump to move on,” but feel like Fox News is urging the president “through the TV screen to re-escalate his war.”
“This is absolutely out of control,” Alex Jones said this week during a livestream, calling for using the “25th Amendment, impeachment, whatever needs to happen” to get Trump to end the war…
We’ll be hearing more from Disney later today, now that the FCC public comment period for the ABC license renewal battle has officially ended.
Yesterday, a consortium of 22 advocacy groups, including the ACLU and the National Coalition Against Censorship, wrote to Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro: “We urge you to continue to defend and exercise your First Amendment rights, so that we can all continue to exercise ours.” D’Amaro is certainly doing that. Variety’s Brian Steinberg has more here…
X has “settled a long-running legal battle with a major advertising trade body that it had accused of orchestrating an ‘illegal boycott’ against the social media platform,” the FT’s Daniel Thomas reports.
Financial terms of the settlement with the World Federation of Advertisers were not disclosed. Here’s a gift link to the article…
>> Last year Elon Musk felt burned by his DOGE experiment and said he would spend “a lot less” on campaigns going forward. Few believed him at the time. And this is why: Musk is “jumping into the midterms with a huge investment in a plan to boost Republican voter turnout,” Alex Isenstadt reports. (Axios)
>> In Australia, X “complained that the proposals to increase pressure on sites to demonstrate efforts to crack down on underage access are unnecessary, ill-suited, unfair, and could violate privacy rights,” Isabella Ward reports. (WIRED)
>> And in Minnesota, Musk’s xAI has filed suit “over the state’s first-in-the-nation law that bans ‘nudification’ technology on websites and apps, potentially providing a test for how far states can go in constitutionally regulating the use of AI,” The AP’s Marc Levy and Barbara Ortutay report.
>> New this morning: The recent overhaul of Disney+ “has begun to pay dividends,” Lucas Shaw and Thomas Buckley report. (Bloomberg)
>> “Inside HuffPost’s tense post-layoff town hall on Wednesday, shaken staffers demanded answers about the cuts and questioned Byron Allen’s vision for the BuzzFeed-owned newsroom,” Natalie Korach reports. (Status)
>> Speaking of Allen, he is “marking 20 years of ‘Comics Unleashed’ with a two-hour primetime special on CBS” in September. (LateNighter)
>> Meantime, Stephen Colbert has received an anti-censorship prize from the Before Columbus Foundation. (AP)
>> Netflix “is dishing out $200 million for broadcast rights to next year’s FIFA Women’s World Cup” in Brazil, “one of the biggest media deals on an annual basis for a women’s sports property,” Vanessa Perdomo reports. (Bloomberg)
AMC and Netflix have struck a five-year, $500 million “co-exclusive” streaming deal for “The Walking Dead” universe, THR’s Alex Weprin reports. The deal will bring “all six spin-off series to Netflix starting next year,” shared with the AMC+ streaming service. The original “Walking Dead” series will also come to AMC+ for the first time next year.
AMC announced the pact alongside its quarterly earnings this morning. The company reported a nearly 9% year-over-year decline in revenue, Weprin writes, but raised its guidance thanks to the Netflix pact…
This edition of Reliable Sources was edited by Andrew Kirell and produced with Liam Reilly. Email us your feedback and tips here.