Screenshot/The Joe Rogan Experience with Trump YouTube
At several moments in American history there have been major breakthroughs in the way politicians interact with the media and with voters. Calvin Coolidge was the first to have his inauguration broadcast nationally over radio. Franklin Roosevelt skipped traditional media in his “fireside chats,” taking his words straight to the public through their radio sets. Ronald Reagan circumvented pressroom bias with regular television broadcasts from the Oval Office to Americans’ living rooms. In 2016, Donald Trump skipped the fake-news bias by taking directly to Twitter. However, not since Abraham Lincoln has a president so consequentially changed his interaction with media and voters not just once, but twice.
Lincoln’s two seismic shifts came in the highly popularized Lincoln-Douglas debates and later as President when he wrote letters to the newspapers that were consumed directly by the public. Similarly, Trump’s second consequential leap in his interactions with modern media came as he sat for hours at a time in long-form podcasts and interviews. And I mean really long form. Trump delivered interviews between one and three-plus hours in length, primarily on shows with little-to-no political programming. We can rightly assume that the tens of millions of audience members he reached at the sought-after low-propensity voters.
These long form conversations were marvels in two specific ways. First, they sharply contrasted with his opponent, Kamala Harris, who could barely manage interviews a few minutes in length (that were heavily edited, no less). But perhaps most important, Trump’s strategy displayed a totally different side of him than can be gleaned from watching so-called “legacy” media. Trump’s dominant (and victorious) podcast strategy in 2024, shared by his running mate JD Vance, may have ushered us into a new era of American politics. Perhaps soundbite culture is falling to the wayside, and robust, thoughtful discussions will once again rise to the surface of American politics.
This post originally appeared at https://www.phyllisschlafly.com/constitution/free-speech/new-media-formats-dominate-2024-election/
