Can Legacy Media Survive the Post-election Manosphere Reign?

What we can learn from Trump’s anti-establishment media ecosystem

The autopsies began as soon as 11 PM Eastern on election night, when it became obvious that Donald Trump had won reelection. Almost instantly, the blame game exploded into intraparty mudslinging (see: The Atlantic’s “Blame Biden”); Liz Cheney dunking; and the self-cannibalization of Democratic strategists.

Legacy media faced a cocktail of its own post-mortems before Trump’s 2024 win, but it’s gotten more painfully palpable since. The broadcast industry’s election coverage suffered a steep 26-percent decline in ratings, going from nearly 57 million viewers in 2020 to 42 million this year. The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times confronted their billionaire owners over non-endorsement decisions, all the while the American public’s trust in journalism plummeted to record lows. On top of that, journalists must confront the fact that we now face the aftermath of what Axios calls “the shards of glass” news era. How and where Americans receive information has fractured into media silos, from Twitch streamers to TikTok videos to Elon Musk’s X pro-Trump “For you” page. Mainstream media outlets are watching its dominance in narrating the news slip — and sometimes dangerously, to unchecked misinformation campaigns. 

As newsrooms anxiously dissect this siloed reality, one theory for mainstream media’s waning influence this election cycle is rising to the occasion: Trump’s venture into the manosphere, partially masterminded by none other than his own Gen Z son, Barron. Put another way, the manosphere meticulously, over the course of several years, contributed to a culture of misinformation that allowed people like the president-elect to thrive in and influence digital spaces.