> [!note] from Bullhorn We're all asking these questions. Good the mainstream press is managing to notice [[Voters don't read]] ### Metadata - Author: [[Ross Douthat]] - Date: October 12, 2024 - URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/12/opinion/harris-trump-interviews.html ### Highlights *This future is, as ever, unevenly distributed. There is still a big share of older Americans who experience politics through a daily newspaper, “60 Minutes” or “Face the Nation.” There is a share of Americans, the committed partisans and infovores, that will always supply an audience for national media operations.* *But as the first group ages further, the older dispensation will become more and more of a niche in its own right, a small constellation in the larger, weirder panoply. A few prominent enterprises will endure, a much-diminished version of the mainstream media, but much of the industry will be a vast terra incognita of YouTube stars, podcasters and social media communities, across which algorithmic waves sweep back and forth mysteriously.* *Is this a dark future? Not in every respect. The terra incognita will probably be less vulnerable to establishment groupthink than the order it’s replacing, and I suspect it will be less vulnerable to manipulative malice than a lot of liberals currently expect: The ownership of Twitter-turned-X or Google will matter on the margins, but in the end, even Elon Musk is stuck competing with countless rival posters.* *On the other hand, the new world will be extremely online, with all that entails — more autodidacts, monomaniacs and grifters, more antisemitism and racism, more wild rumors and less agreement on basic features of reality, a few highbrow refuges but a general lowbrow dominance.* *And the new landscape will almost certainly be more mysterious, less legible, making it harder for newspaper columnists to generalize and harder for campaigns to strategize.* *Does a 90-minute debate matter more than the viral clips that it produces? A big speech more than a niche appearance that hits some sweet spot? What does the public actually know? What ideas reach them?* *And finally, a question we’ll be asking more and more: Who are these people, and why are they interviewing our presidential candidates?*