The mainstream media will lose its last grip on relevancy

In 2025, I predict two things: The mainstream media will lose its last grip on relevancy, and the fundamental gap in understanding between partisan Americans will widen. The gap between mainstream media readers, people who get most of their news through influencers or partisan social media, and people who barely think about news at all will create a fundamental schism in how Americans see the world.

The 2024 election showed just how irrelevant mainstream news coverage is outside the beltway and chattering class. A big chunk of Americans ignore news completely, or get it sporadically from TikTok, X, or YouTube. Rather than seeking it out, people are exposed to snippets of current affairs as part of curated news feeds, often from obscure or disreputable sources (only 3% of Facebook’s content is political news).

Meanwhile, the right has capitalized on the decline of legacy media, expertly curating a profitable and thriving ecosystem of podcasters, influencers, alt-tech platforms like Rumble, and media companies like the Daily Wire propped up by conservative billionaires and funders. Young talent is found in spaces like TikTok, developed and incubated in spaces like PragerU, promoted by other influencers, and amplified by social media spaces that prioritize conservative content. As Taylor Lorenz recently pointed out, their leftist equivalents are often stuck working on a shoestring. No matter how liberal they are, left-wing billionaires are unlikely to support creators who advocate for socialism or the abolition of wealth hoarding.

Influencers are not bound by journalistic ethics or objectivity and are free to take funding from companies, PACs, and wealthy donors. They speak directly to the concerns of younger people, pushing populist messaging. Entry points into this right-wing ecosystem come through various forms of entrepreneurial hucksterism. Young people faced with high housing costs, dwindling job prospects, and inflation — regardless of what economic statistics say — seize on webinars and YouTube videos by people claiming that you can hustle and grind your way into economic success, whether through crypto, dropshipping, multi-level marketing schemes, or OnlyFans. Once drawn in by promises of glittering wealth, they consume a constant drone of conservative content that promotes regressive gender roles, American isolationism, and toxic individualism. Trump’s messaging works perfectly in this space.

As a researcher of far-right disinformation, I spend plenty of time in fringe Telegram communities where people think Joe Biden is a lizard person and QAnon’s allegations are widely accepted as a fact of life. But while claims about kids getting sex changes at school, immigrants eating dogs and cats, and babies murdered under the guise of “abortion” are equally false, a significant portion of the population believes them. As anyone who’s had a friend or loved one go down a similar rabbit hole knows, pointing out that these claims are incorrect doesn’t help. Every absurd assertion has a body of evidence behind it. The most persuasive — like false claims about immigrants causing crime — are so deeply embedded in the American psyche that they’re very hard to shake.

Americans have always lived in different worlds. Think of the Black press, which was founded in the early decades of the nineteenth century to address community needs after white newspapers not only refused to cover issues of concern to Black readers, but routinely spread incorrect, racist, and biased information about Black Americans. Those who read Black newspapers and those who read white newspapers got a different picture of the American experience. As Dominic-Madori Davis pointed out in her prediction last year, the mainstream press still does not cover issues of concern to Black Americans. 75% of U.S. journalists are white, and most Black Americans believe that the mainstream media depicts Black people negatively. Amid today’s economic inequality, partisan ecosystems, and the decline of shared cultural touchstones like mainstream media, this compounding disparity has given rise to an ecosystem of Black influencers who — surprise! — spread inaccurate information.

Hand-wringing over the 2016 election led to a huge apparatus of disinformation research, and we now understand a lot about why false information spreads (it’s a combination of emotional appeal, partisan animus, and algorithmic amplification). But we are no closer to solving the problem at its center: How can we find common ground when we can’t agree on basic facts?

2024 was the year “disinformation” outlasted its usefulness. Moving forward, we should not be concerned with isolated incorrect facts, but with the deeply-rooted stories that circulate at all levels of culture and shape our points of view. The challenge for 2025 is to confront these deeper epistemic divides that shape how Americans understand the world; in other words, the ways we arrive at the knowledge that forms our perspective. If we don’t start studying these divides with the urgency they demand — and learning from history about how such rifts can be bridged — we’ll be stuck in a permanent cycle of shouting across the void, unable to solve our biggest challenges or even agree on what they are.