Ian Tuttle writes for National Review Online about an interesting development during the 2024 election cycle.
At the New York Times, Ross Douthat takes note of one of the signal features of the 2024 election cycle:
In 2024, the media future . . . [is] embodied by the sex-and-relationships podcaster and the bro comedians who scored important interviews with Kamala Harris and Donald Trump this month — with the host of “Call Her Daddy,” Alex Cooper, tossing Harris questions about abortion and student loans, while the comics Andrew Schulz and Akaash Singh chatted with Trump about his nicknaming strategy on their show, “Flagrant.” . . . The nominees and their running mates have consistently submitted to interviews with shows and personalities who were barely on my radar screen.
For older voters who remember Barack Obama “slow-jamming the news” with Jimmy Fallon, or Bill Clinton playing saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show, Douthat observes that these new appearances are of a different genus. The candidates, Trump especially, have recognized that many voters are accessible mainly through “a vast terra incognita of YouTube stars, podcasters and social media communities, across which algorithmic waves sweep back and forth mysteriously.” The share of Americans tied to more traditional media — Face the Nation, Meet the Press, or the New York Times — is shrinking. As that demographic reduces further, Douthat writes, “it will become more and more of a niche in its own right, a small constellation in the larger, weirder panoply.”
What Douthat identifies is another symptom of what is arguably the fundamental shift in American cultural life over the past generation: We are moving from an essentially televisual to an essentially digital age. The convulsions of the last several years have much to do with the disintegration of a set of structures, rules, and incentives that have shaped America’s information economy for more than half a century.
