The death of neutrality: How Trump’s campaign reshaped political communication

Trump’s 2024 victory revealed a seismic shift in political communication. As trust in mainstream media collapsed, his strategy of long-form, unedited content triumphed over Harris’s traditional approach, marking the end of artificial neutrality and the rise of declared biases in political discourse.

For nearly a century, American journalism aspired to an ideal of objectivity. In 2024, this façade finally shattered as the presidential campaign exposed what many had long suspected: both mainstream media and technology platforms harbor inherent political biases, and the pretense of neutrality has outlived its usefulness.

The Collapse of Trust

The collapse of trust in traditional media reveals a profound institutional crisis.

According to Gallup’s long-term tracking, public confidence in mainstream media has plummeted from 70 percent in 1976 to 31% today, with a stark partisan divide: 58% of Democrats maintain faith in traditional media, while only 11% of Republicans share that confidence.

Yet the digital alternatives have not filled the void. 

A Free Press survey of 3,000 Americans uncovered a telling paradox: while abandoning traditional news sources, Americans increasingly turn to social media and podcasts, despite significant skepticism about these platforms.

This fractured media landscape set the stage for the 2024 presidential campaign.

A Tale of Two Media Strategies

The collapse of traditional media’s authority created a natural experiment in political communication. Following Biden’s withdrawal, Harris’s nomination presented voters with a stark contrast in how politicians navigate America’s transformed media landscape.

Harris doubled down on institutional credibility, maintaining a careful choreography of mainstream media appearances: CNN interviews, CBS’s “60 Minutes” segments, and calculated talk show visits. Each interaction was meticulously crafted to project presidential competence.

Trump, meanwhile, weaponized public distrust. He embraced platforms allowing direct, unfiltered communication: a three-hour conversation with Joe Rogan, a live session with Elon Musk on X, and extensive exchanges with digital influencers. The results were telling — while Harris struggled to reach a million listeners on popular podcasts, Trump’s unfiltered conversations generated tens of millions of views, particularly among younger voters who had abandoned traditional news formats.

When Gatekeeping Backfires

Two incidents in the campaign’s final month crystallized how institutional attempts to control political narratives now consistently backfire. The first came from CBS’s “60 Minutes,” when their edited version of Harris’s interview — justified by routine “time constraints” — sparked a firestorm. Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit alleging deliberate manipulation transformed a standard editing decision into a referendum on media trustworthiness.

The crisis extended to tech giants when YouTube users reported difficulty finding Trump’s interview with Joe Rogan, despite its record-breaking 40 million views. The platform’s acknowledgment of the problem (“We know it was frustrating for users”) only fueled suspicions about algorithmic gatekeeping, leading to a House Judiciary Committee investigation.

These controversies revealed a crucial shift: traditional media’s editorial judgment, once accepted as expertise, now reads as manipulation. Tech platforms’ content moderation, originally welcomed as quality control, appears as censorship. Each attempt at institutional control reinforced the narrative it sought to manage.

The New Architecture of Trust

The 2024 campaign revealed fundamental shifts in how political messages earn credibility. 

Three key principles emerged:

Depth over soundbites: Long-form, unedited conversations triumph over polished snippets. When audiences witness three-hour discussions, they become active participants rather than passive recipients, preferring to draw their own conclusions.

Transparent bias over false neutrality: As institutional trust collapses, audiences favor voices that openly declare their biases. This transparency builds more trust than traditional media’s increasingly dubious claims of neutrality.

Authenticity over production: In an age of AI and sophisticated manipulation, high production values have become suspicious. Raw, unpolished human interaction carries greater credibility precisely because it’s harder to manufacture.

These principles echo 19th-century American political communication when partisan newspapers openly championed their ideological perspectives. Today’s fragmented media landscape might represent less a degradation of discourse than a return to a more honest form of it.

Democracy in an Age of Authenticity

This transformation demands new competencies from all democratic participants. Politicians must master extended, unfiltered conversations where authentic belief matters more than polish. Media organizations face an existential choice: embrace transparency about their perspectives, or risk irrelevance in a world that increasingly values declared bias over artificial objectivity.

Most crucially, citizens inherit both a burden and an opportunity. Rather than relying on supposedly neutral arbiters, voters must develop skills in navigating multiple viewpoints and acknowledged biases. The task of finding truth shifts from passive consumption to active synthesis — a more demanding, but potentially more democratic model of political discourse.

The Silver Lining for a Modern Democracy

The transformation we witnessed in 2024 marks more than a shift in campaign strategies; it signals a fundamental reimagining of how democratic societies process political information. While some may mourn the passing of supposedly neutral journalism, this new landscape might actually strengthen democratic dialogue by acknowledging what was always true: all political communication comes with perspective.

In this complexity lies cause for optimism. When biases are openly declared, audiences can more effectively evaluate the information they receive. When conversations unfold at length, nuance emerges naturally. The 2024 election didn’t just demonstrate Trump’s mastery of this new media environment — it revealed that the future of political communication had already arrived.

This transformation may be precisely what democracy needs in an age of artificial intelligence, synthetic media, and sophisticated manipulation. Perhaps by abandoning the pretense of perfect neutrality, we can build something more honest, more engaging, and ultimately more democratic.