“You are the media now.” That’s the message that began to cohere among right-wing influencers shortly after Donald Trump won the election this week. Elon Musk first posted the phrase, and others followed. “The legacy media is dead. Hollywood is done. Truth telling is in. No more complaining about the media,” the right-wing activist James O’Keefe posted shortly after. “You are the media.”

It’s a particularly effective message for Musk, who spent $44 billion to purchase a communications platform that he has harnessed to undermine existing media institutions and directly support Trump’s campaign. QAnon devotees also know the phrase as a rallying cry, an invitation to participate in a particular kind of citizen “journalism” that involves just asking questions and making stuff up altogether.

“You are the media now” is also a good message because, well, it might be true.

A defining quality of this election cycle has been that few people seem to be able to agree on who constitutes “the media,” what their role ought to be, or even how much influence they have in 2024. Based on Trump and Kamala Harris’s appearances on various shows—and especially Trump and J. D. Vance’s late-race interviews with Joe Rogan, which culminated in the popular host’s endorsement—some have argued that this was the “podcast election.” But there’s broad confusion over what actually moves the needle. Is the press the bulwark against fascism, or is it ignored by a meaningful percentage of the country? It is certainly beleaguered by a conservative effort to undermine media institutions, with Trump as its champion and the fracturing caused by algorithmic social media. It can feel existential at times competing for attention and reckoning with the truth that many Americans don’t read, trust, or really care all that much about what papers, magazines, or cable news have to say.

All of this contributes to a well-documented, slow-moving crisis of legacy media—a cocktail whose ingredients also include declining trust, bad economics, political pressure, vulture capitalists, the rise of the internet, and no shortage of coverage decisions from mainstream institutions that have alienated or infuriated some portion of their audiences. Each and every one of these things affected how Americans experienced this election, though it is impossible to say what the impact is in aggregate. If “you are the media,” then there is no longer a consensus reality informed by what audiences see and hear: Everyone chooses their own adventure.

[Read: The great social-media news collapse]

The confusion felt most palpable in the days following Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June. I noticed conflicting complaints from liberals online: Some argued that until that point, the media had failed to cover Biden’s age out of fear of crossing some editorial redline, while others said the media were now recklessly engaged in a coordinated effort to oust the president, shamefully crusading against his age. Then, Biden’s administration leveled its own critique: “I want you to ask yourself, what have these people been right about lately?” it wrote in an email. “Seriously. Think about it.” Everyone seemed frustrated for understandable reasons. But there was no coherence to be found in this moment: The media were either powerful and incompetent or naive and irrelevant … or somehow both.

The vibe felt similar around The Washington Post’s decision not to endorse Harris in the final weeks of the race after the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, intervened and shut the effort down. Readers were outraged by the notion that one of the world’s richest men was capitulating to Trump: The paper reportedly lost at least 250,000 subscribers, or 10 percent of its digital base, in just a handful of days following the decision.

But even that signal was fuzzy. The endorsement was never going to change the election’s outcome. As many people, including Bezos himself, argued, newspaper endorsements don’t matter. The writer Max Read noted that Bezos’s intervention was its own indicator of the Post’s waning relevance. “As a journalist, you don’t actually want your publication to be used as a political weapon for a billionaire,” Read wrote. “But it would be nice for your publication to be so powerful and unavoidable that a billionaire might try.” This tension was everywhere throughout campaign season: Media institutions were somehow failing to meet the moment, but it was also unclear if they still had any meaningful power to shape outcomes at all.

I’ve watched for the past year with grim fascination as both the media industry and its audience have sparred and tried to come to some shared understanding of what the hell is going on. The internet destroyed monoculture years ago, but as I wrote last December, it’s recently felt harder to know what anyone else is doing, seeing, or hearing online anymore.

News sites everywhere have seen traffic plummet in the past two years. That’s partly the fault of technology companies and their algorithmic changes, which have made people less likely to see or click on articles when using products like Google Search or Facebook. But research suggests that isn’t the entire story: Audiences are breaking up with news, too. An influencer economy has emerged on social-media platforms. It’s not an ecosystem that produces tons of original reporting, but it feels authentic to its audience.

Traditional journalism operates with a different playbook, typically centered on strong ethical norms and a spirit of objectivity; the facts are meant to anchor the story, even where commentary is concerned. This has presented challenges in the Trump era, which has produced genuine debates about whether traditional objectivity is possible or useful. Some audiences crave obvious resistance against the Republican regime. Outlets such as the The New York Times have tried to forge a middle path—to be, in executive editor Joe Kahn’s words, a “nonpartisan source of information” that occupies a “neutral middle ground” without devolving into “both-sides journalism.” This has had the unfortunate effect of downplaying the asymmetries between candidates and putting detached, clinical language onto politics that feel primal and urgent. When it comes to covering Trump, critics of the Times see double standards and a “sanewashing” of his alarming behavior.

Independent online creators aren’t encumbered by any of this hand-wringing over objectivity or standards: They are concerned with publishing as much as they can, in order to cultivate audiences and build relationships with them. For them, posting is a volume game. It’s also about working ideas out in public. Creators post and figure it out later; if they make mistakes, they post through it. Eventually people forget. When I covered the rise of the less professionalized pro-Trump media in 2016, what felt notable to me was its allergy to editing. These people livestreamed and published unpolished three-hour podcasts. It’s easier to build a relationship with people when you’re in their ears 15 hours a week: Letting it all hang out can feel more authentic, like you have nothing to hide.

Critics can debate whether this kind of content is capital-J Journalism until the heat death of the universe, but the undeniable truth is that people, glued to their devices, like to consume information when it’s informally presented via parasocial relationships with influencers. They enjoy frenetic, algorithmically curated short-form video, streaming and long-form audio, and the feeling that only a slight gap separates creator and consumer. Major media outlets are trying to respond to this shift: The Times’ online front page, for example, has started to feature reporters in what amounts to prestige TikToks.

Yet the influencer model is also deeply exploitable. One of the most aggressive attempts to interfere in this election didn’t come directly from operators in Russia, but rather from a legion of useful idiots in the United States. Russia simply used far-right influencers to do their bidding with the large audiences they’d already acquired.

[Read: YouTubers are almost too easy to dupe]

Watching this from inside the media, I’ve experienced two contradicting feelings. First is a kind of powerlessness from working in an industry with waning influence amid shifting consumption patterns. The second is the notion that the craft, rigor, and mission of traditional journalism matter more than ever. Recently I was struck by a line from the Times’ Ezra Klein. “The media doesn’t actually set the agenda the way people sometimes pretend that it does,” he said late last month. “The audience knows what it believes. If you are describing something they don’t really feel is true, they read it, and they move on. Or they don’t read it at all.” Audiences vote with their attention, and that attention is the most important currency for media businesses, which, after all, need people to care enough to scroll past ads and pony up for subscriptions.

It is terribly difficult to make people care about things they don’t already have an interest in—especially if you haven’t nurtured the trust necessary to lead your audience. As a result, news organizations frequently take cues from what they perceive people will be interested in. This often means covering people who already attract a lot of attention, under the guise of newsworthiness. (Trump and Musk are great examples of people who have sufficiently hijacked this system.) This is why there can be a herding effect in coverage.

Numerous media critics and theorists on Threads and Bluesky, themselves subject to the incentives of the attention economy, balked at Klein’s perspective, citing historical social-science research that media organizations absolutely influence political metanarratives. They’re right, too. When the press coheres around a narrative that also manages to capture the public’s attention, it can have great influence. But these people weren’t just disagreeing with Klein: They were angry with him. “Another one of those ‘we’re just a smol bean national paper of record’ excuses when part of the issue was how they made Biden’s age the top story day after day after day,” one historian posted.

These arguments over media influence—specifically the Times’—occurred frequently on social media throughout the election cycle, and occasionally, a reporter would offer a rebuttal. “To think The Times has influence with Trump voters or even swing voters is to fundamentally misunderstand the electorate,” the Times political reporter Jonathan Weisman posted in October. “And don’t say The Times influences other outlets that do reach those voters. It’s not true.” The argument is meant to suggest that newspaper coverage alone cannot stop a popular authoritarian movement. At the same time, these defenses inevitably led critics to argue: Do you think what you do matters or not?

In a very real sense, these are all problems that the media created for itself. As Semafor’s Ben Smith argued last month, discussing the period following Trump’s 2016 win, “a whole generation of non-profit and for-profit newsrooms held out their hands to an audience that wanted to support a cause, not just to purchase a service.” These companies sold democracy itself and a vision of holding Trump’s power to account. “The thing with marketing, though,” Smith continued, “is that you eventually have to deliver what you sold.” Trump’s win this week may very well be the proof that critics and beleaguered citizens need to stop writing those checks.

A subscription falloff would also highlight the confusing logic of this era for the media. It would mean that the traditional media industry—fractured, poorly funded, constantly under attack, and in competition with attention gatherers who don’t have to play by the same rules—is simultaneously viewed as having had enough power to stop Trump, but also past its prime, having lost its sway and relevance. Competition is coming from a durable alternative-media ecosystem, the sole purpose of which is to ensconce citizens in their chosen reality, regardless of whether it’s true. And it is coming from Musk’s X, which the centibillionaire quickly rebuilt into a powerful communication tool that largely serves the MAGA coalition.

[Read: I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is]

Spaces like X offer an environment for toxic ideas paired with a sense of empowerment for disaffected audiences. This is part of what Kate Starbird, a professor at the University of Washington, calls the right’s “powerful, partisan, & participatory media environment to support its messaging, which offers a compelling ‘deep story’ for its participants.” By contrast, the left’s media ecosystem, she argues, relies “upon rigid, self-preserving institutional media and its ‘story’ is little more than a defense of imperfect institutions.” The right’s media ecosystem might be chaotic, conspiracist, and poisonous, but it offers its consumers a world to get absorbed in—plus, the promise that they can shape it themselves.

Would it have been possible for things to go differently if Harris had attempted to tap into this alternative ecosystem? I’m not so sure. Following Harris’s entrance into the race, each passing week felt more consequential, but more rigidly locked in place. Memes, rallies, and marathon podcast appearances from Trump offered data points, but there was no real way to interpret them. Some Zoomers and Millennials were ironically coconut-pilled; people were leaving Trump rallies early; everyone was arguing about who was actually garbage. Even when something seemed to matter, it was hard to tell whom it mattered to, or what might happen because of it. When it’s unclear what information everyone is consuming or which filter bubble they’re trapped in, everyone tends to shadowbox their conception of an imagined audience. Will the Rogan bros vote? Did a stand-up comedian’s insult activate a groundswell of Puerto-Rican American support? We didn’t really know anything for certain until we did.

“You are the media now” is powerful because it capitalizes on the reality that it is difficult to know where genuine influence comes from these days. The phrase sounds empowering. Musk’s acolytes see it as the end of traditional-media gatekeeping. But what he’s really selling is the notion that people are on their own—that facts are malleable, and that what feels true ought to be true.

A world governed by the phrase do your own research is also a world where the Trumps and Musks can operate with impunity. Is it the news media’s job to counter this movement—its lies, its hate? Is it also their job to appeal to some of the types of people who listen to Joe Rogan? I’d argue that it is. But there’s little evidence right now that it stands much of a chance.

Something has to change. Perhaps it’s possible to appropriate “You are the media now” and use it as a mission statement to build an industry more capable of meeting whatever’s coming. Perhaps in the absence of a shared reality, fighting against an opposing information ecosystem isn’t as effective as giving more people a reason to get excited about, and pay attention to, yours.

Jones was best known as the producer of three Michael Jackson albums - Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad.

Donald Trump’s history of racism is breathtaking. His track record of prejudice is so prodigious that keeping all of the incidents straight is difficult: There’s the Central Park Five, the “Muslim ban,” his response to Charlottesville. “Shithole” countries and lamenting that Nigerian immigrants won’t “go back to their huts.” The fabrications about Haitians eating pets. There’s Sunday’s horrifying Madison Square Garden rally, where Trump surrogates made racist comments about Harris and Puerto Rico. The list goes on. And grows. You would be hard-pressed to find a more brazenly racist major American politician on this side of the Civil Rights Act.

Future historians will therefore marvel at the fact that Trump has increased his support among African Americans since he was elected to the presidency in 2016. No serious person expects Trump to win anything close to a majority of Black voters in this year’s election. But months upon months of polls—from a welter of different pollsters—predict Trump substantially growing his share of those voters, particularly young Black men. In a recent poll of Black voters, 58 percent of Black men said they’d support Vice President Kamala Harris if the election were held today, and 26 percent said they’d vote for Trump—a percentage that would represent record-setting support for a Republican candidate.

Other forms of evidence—shoe-leather reporting, first-person testimony, 16 years of declining Black male support for Democratic presidential candidates, the presence of the Black manosphere—suggest that we are in the midst of a substantial racial realignment. If Democratic candidates have long benefited from Black magic—the near-universal support of African Americans—the spell has been broken for a growing share of Black men. Now Democrats, including the Harris campaign, are trying to figure out how to cast a new one. But the chances of stopping the realignment appear slim, because Black voters are both more culturally conservative and more economically liberal than the current version of the Democratic Party.

[Read: Why do Black people vote for Democrats?]

Lauren Harper Pope, a political and communications strategist, told me politicians need to start thinking of Black men—in contrast to more reliably Democratic Black women—as politically independent. “I’ve been telling people for months: Black men, Hispanic men, minority men are independent voters,” she said. “People need to look past the concept that if you’re a Black man with a college degree, you’re going to vote for a Democrat. No. Absolutely not. I’ve got plenty of Black friends who have college degrees who are from the South, not from the South, whatever, who are genuinely concerned about things the Democratic Party is doing.”

Sharon Wright Austin, a political scientist at the University of Florida, also believes that some level of realignment is happening. “I do think we have to take the polls seriously, because they are showing that Donald Trump is getting more support among Black men,” she told me. “I don’t know if the numbers are going to be as high as the polls indicate. I do think there are going to be some African Americans who are going to vote for Trump because they find him to be a better candidate.” Austin noted that the strength of the economy under Trump, as well as some Black men’s discomfort with Democratic positions on cultural issues such as abortion, trans rights, and immigration, are likely driving some of this defection.

Other political scientists who specialize in Black politics contest the idea that Black voting habits are meaningfully changing. Justin Zimmerman, a political-science professor at the University of Albany, said that the kind of frustration Black men are exhibiting isn’t new. “It’s not so much that there’s no Black political disenchantment with the Democratic Party,” Zimmerman told me. “That’s always been there.” He said that most rankled African Americans will likely hold their nose and vote for a candidate they may not be enthusiastic about, something Black voters have had to do throughout American history.

Christopher Towler, who directs the Black Voter Project and is a partner at Black Insights Research, also dismissed the notion that African Americans are undergoing a meaningful transition away from the Democratic Party. He argues that polls frequently rely on small sample sizes of Black voters, which makes getting a representative cross-section of the Black community impossible.

“You have a sample that has [18 to19] percent support for Trump, but it has a nine-point margin of error,” Towler told me. “That means it could be as low as 10 or as high as 27 percent. That tells us absolutely nothing.”

Although this point about sample size is reasonable and was echoed by other political scientists I interviewed, it fails to explain why those sample-size errors would lead to polling consistently skewed in one direction. And, more important, it discounts historical trends: Democrats have been bleeding male Black voters for nearly two decades.

Some degree of realignment was probably inevitable, given the widening mismatch between the worldview of many Black men and that of the Democratic Party. Many Black voters are quite conservative, especially culturally, and they may hold views on issues like abortion and gender that are more at home in the Republican Party. In June, the Pew Research Center released what is perhaps the most comprehensive recent survey of American opinions about fraught cultural issues. Conducted when Joe Biden was still the Democrats’ presidential nominee, Pew’s polling illustrates notable contrasts between the views of Black and white supporters of the Democratic candidate. On an array of cultural questions, Black Biden supporters were not simply more conservative than their white peers; they were more conservative than any other demographic group in the Democratic coalition.

Pew found that Black Biden supporters were the least likely to answer questions about immigrants favorably, trailing white supporters by double digits. Similarly, Black Biden voters were about twice as likely to say that “an emphasis on marriage and family makes society better off” compared with their white counterparts. And whereas only 32 percent of white Biden supporters agreed that “gender is determined by a person’s sex assigned at birth,” 64 percent of Black Biden voters said they agreed. Black Biden voters were also much less likely than any other group of Biden voters to say they were comfortable with they/them pronouns. When the questions turned to religion, the differences were even more stark: 35 percent of Black Biden voters said “government should support religious values” and more than half—a higher percentage than among Trump supporters —said “belief in God is needed for morality.” Only 7 and 8 percent of white Biden supporters, respectively, said the same. A different Pew survey from the same period also found that majorities of Black men and Black women agreed that “the government [promotes] birth control and abortion to keep the Black population small.” Again, these polls were not conducted when Harris was the candidate, but there is little reason to believe that cultural attitudes among Black Democrats suddenly changed when she became the nominee.

Since Trump’s rise, Democrats have seemed to assume that if they yell about his racism, misogyny, and authoritarian tendencies enough, African Americans will be scared or shamed into voting for Hillary Clinton, Biden, and now Harris. Eight years ago, the Clinton campaign dropped an ad tying Trump to Ku Klux Klan members; after she lost the election, she warned that Trump supporters wanted to take away the rights of Black Americans. For this year’s presidential race, the Harris campaign has commissioned former President Barack Obama to scold Black men for allegedly being too sexist to vote for the first Black woman president. Harris is hammering messages about fascism, racism, and democracy in the campaign’s final week even though polls have shown that these talking points are among the least popular with voters of all kinds—to say nothing of the fact that Black voters have been moving toward Trump despite nearly a decade of those messages being shouted from a bullhorn.

Democrats seem unwilling to believe that a small but significant portion of Black voters might be willing to overlook Trump’s racism, and are even drawn to aspects of his nationalism, xenophobia, and traditionalism. When Biden won in 2020, many liberal talking heads cheered that “Black voters saved democracy” and heaped praise on Black “superhero women”  as part of an outpouring of awkward gratitude that several Black pundits noted was a little fetishistic and traded in “magical negro tropes.” Some progressives seem to imagine minority voters as mythical beings, electoral angels who radiate light and virtue. In their minds, the Democratic Party is a Marvel movie coalition of Nice Whites and Saintly Blacks and Browns who team up every four years to try to save the country from the Bad Whites: the hodgepodge of unsavory working-class whites and car-dealership-owning whites and Christian-nationalist whites who make up Trump’s coalition. But people of color are people, not saints or saintly monoliths, and the cost of this idealization has been a certain blindness in Democratic circles to the actual, rather than imagined, political landscape within minority communities. And it’s not just African Americans: Other male minority voters are also generally less liberal than white Democrats. Recent polls found that 44 percent of young Latino men back Trump and more than half of Hispanic men support deportations of undocumented immigrants (51 percent) and building the border wall (52 percent). These men are more than twice as likely to say Trump, compared with Biden, helped them personally.

The question, then, is what to do about these growing tensions between the cultural views of Black Americans and other minority voters and those of the Democratic Party. Despite their competing views on realignment, the experts I spoke with largely agreed that Democrats tend to take Black voters for granted, and that the Harris campaign should have started doing targeted outreach to Black voters much sooner. “What Black folks want is an identifiable, explicit agenda,” the political scientist Sekou Franklin told me, one that appeals to their unique needs and interests. He added, “That’s what they’re seeing with LGBTQ+ persons … That’s what they’re seeing with women, so they want the same thing.” Others said that some in the Black community think too much money is going to help foreign countries overseas, while Black Americans—especially Black men—struggle at home. Black Americans are among the least supportive of sending military aid to Ukraine and Israel.

[Daniel K. Williams: Democrats can’t rely on the Black Church anymore]

What Harris has offered to combat these perceptions has been less than inspiring. Trying to court young Black men with policy proposals on crypto, weed legalization, and mentorship programs—the focus of a recent policy rollout—is both confusing and condescending. One ambitious proposal, handing out loans to Black Americans on the basis of race, is very possibly illegal, and thus likely an empty promise. And although Harris has moved to the right explicitly and implicitly on a number of cultural and economic issues, there is approximately zero chance that she can outflank Donald Trump on problems such as immigration, no matter how much she wants to expand the border wall. Anyone whose primary concern is the southern border is almost certainly going to vote for the former president. So if shifting right on cultural and social issues is unlikely to move the needle, what will?

The answer is staring Democrats in the face. If Black voters are perhaps the most culturally conservative wing of the Democratic coalition, they also tend to be among the most progressive on economic issues. A survey this summer found that Black voters are almost twice as likely as other racial demographics to say that “the government should provide more assistance to people in need” and also more likely than any other group to say that Social Security benefits should be expanded. And roughly two-thirds of African Americans say that the government should have a more active hand in solving problems. Another survey found that a majority of African Americans have critical views of the country’s prison system (74 percent), courts (70 percent), policing (68 percent), big businesses (67 percent), economic system (65 percent), and health-care system (51 percent). These are issues that the Democratic Party can credibly claim to be better at addressing than Republicans.

Black voters’ realignment seems less like a sea change than something akin to coastal erosion: a grinding process that can be stopped with concerted collective effort. Democrats cannot out-Republican the Republicans on cultural issues, and it would be a fool’s errand to try. What they can do is spend the final days of the campaign playing to their strengths: loudly championing the kind of bold populist vision that is actually popular with voters, including African Americans.