David Colburn

For all the furor created when both the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times decided not to make endorsements in the presidential election this year, as WaPo owner Jeff Bezos suggested, it was likely much ado about nothing.
“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” Bezos wrote in an opinion piece justifying his decision. “No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias.”
Bezos’s title for the piece was a stinging one for members of the only profession explicitly named in and protected by the U.S. Constitution, the press: “The hard truth – Americans don’t trust the news media.”
To back up his claim, Bezos cited a Gallup poll showing that only 54 percent of Democrats, 27 percent of independents, and a woeful 12 percent of Republicans have a great deal or fair amount of trust in mass media. Indeed, with numbers like that, an endorsement from the Washington Post or any other major news outlet would have done little to nothing to persuade voters one way or another.
Meanwhile, an increasing number of people are getting their news through alternative channels – social media and podcasts. The two are differentiated because social media provides all users with the opportunity to interact with a post, while podcasts provide little to no opportunity for listener interactions.
A Pew Research Center study released on Monday indicates that one-in-five Americans now regularly get their news on social media – X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Truth Social, and others – and that number goes up the younger you go, with four in ten of those under 30 tapping social media for news.
And while debate rages with little research to back it up for now about social media’s ability to persuade undecided voters, there’s near unanimous consensus about the medium’s ability to motivate a candidate’s base, and the clear winner in this regard was Donald Trump. News influencers, those content creators who give their own takes on “news,” are decidedly skewed toward conservatives. The largest, of course, is Elon Musk with over 200 million followers. Musk made over 3,000 posts to his account in October, and X’s algorithms amplified his reach across the platform.
But if you pull Trump out of the mix, conservative-oriented influencers still draw far more attention than liberal-leaning ones. Only one liberal influencer, Carlos Eduardo Espina, an immigrant rights activist, has over 10 million followers with 18 million. Meanwhile the top four conservative social media news influencers – Logan Paul, Jake Paul, Felix Lengyel, and Tucker Carlson – have a combined 69 million followers. Carlson reaches about five times more people through social media than he did on his FOX News talk show. And those numbers are only for their primary social media feed – most use multiple platforms to get their messages out.
An Edison Research report shows how thoroughly Trump dominated the podcast universe in what many have called the first “podcast election.” Foregoing traditions major media interviews, Trump trolled the podcast airwaves instead, making 20 appearances to Harris’s eight. Trump had three hours on the Joe Rogan Experience, the largest podcast around with 14.5 million subscribers, and the post of the interview to his YouTube channel garnered over 43 million views. Harris punted on going on Rogan’s show. In terms of weekly podcast reach, Trump reached 23.5 million people per week through podcasters such as The Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, and Bussin’ with the Boys, compared to Harris’s paltry 6.4 million. As with social media, the podcasters with the largest audiences skew conservative, and a huge component of their audiences are young men. Listening to podcasts has become as much a part of the lives of 18-24-year-olds as watching television. Trump’s campaign certainly believes podcasts were instrumental in his surprisingly good showing among younger voters, and many, many political pundits agree. Trump went where youth were listening, Harris didn’t. Was it decisive? Hard to say, but AP exit polling showed that while Trump got 41 percent of the vote of young men in 2016, he got 56 percent of that vote in 2024.
Overall, the electorate made a significant shift to the right this year compared to 2016, enough to put Trump over the top. Whatever the issues, messaging about those issues is important, and there’s no way to deny that social media and podcasts were important contributors to a winning campaign strategy. They will likely become more significant in the future, although who can say how social media and podcasts will evolve – those spaces looked far different a decade ago than they do today. If X keeps losing money and followers the way it is right now, it may go belly up before the next election. Newcomer Bluesky has rocketed to the top of the most downloaded free social media apps as disgruntled X users look for a less politicized alternative. Perhaps liberals will find charismatic podcasters to attract more of their base. What’s quite clear is that campaigns that ignore the growing reach and influence of social media and podcasts do so at their peril. There’s no reason to think that driving an Edsel campaign is going to propel one into the White House in the age of Tesla. When it comes to social media and podcasts, take heed of the feeds for your campaign to succeed.