Democracy Dies As Content: The 2024 Election And The Future Of Political Journalism

Photo by Brandon Mowinkel on Unsplash

It wasn’t a newsroom or even a debate stage that signaled the state of political reporting; it was a podcasting studio whose decor looked ripped from a Netflix dating series. Under bland sterile lighting were two mustard yellow, faux-retro chairs, sporadic vases stuffed full of questionably real “flowers,” and, of course, a stack of merch hoodies folded just right to display the show’s name: Call Her Daddy. On this episode of Alex Cooper’s blockbuster hit show (it was Spotify’s second-most-listened-to podcast in the world in 2023, behind only The Joe Rogan Experience), the guest was Vice President Kamala Harris. 

The fact that a presidential nominee was sitting down for a podcast wasn’t newsworthy; Donald Trump already made freewheeling, longform podcast interviews as a core tenet of his media strategy (including a nearly three-hour-long chat with Rogan on October 25), targeting male-dominated media outlets in hopes of locking in young, male voters. What Call Her Daddy solidified was that in this election, both major political parties had begun to put content creators on equal footing with legacy journalism; Cooper, who shot to fame via her relationship and sex advice soundbites, made just as many waves, if not more, talking to Harris as Bill Whitaker, the award-winning journalist at 60 Minutes. 

The writing has been on the (digital) wall for years. 

Pop Crave was one of the first news sources to call the 2020 election for Biden; four years later, it took the account a mere five minutes to reshare Biden’s surprise Sunday announcement that he was dropping out of the election. By contrast, at least one on-air anchor in legacy media had to run straight from Sunday brunch to the CNN studios. Exactly 30 days later, a Pop Crave correspondent tweeted live from the floor of the Democratic National Convention. The news website and social media account was part of a contingent of 200 content creators invited to this year’s convention (a plan in the works while Biden was still nominee). The group included everyone from viral TikTok dancer Merrick Hanna and women’s finance influencer Tori Dunlap, to Hasan Piker, the Turkish-American streamer who has amassed 2.7 million followers on Twitch for his unfiltered political commentary.