On a chilly evening earlier this month, I got chatting with some volunteers in the Trump Force 47 Headquarters in Philadelphia. A few of us sat around in a small room, waiting for the start of a training course aimed at recruiting a team of “campaign captains”.
The campaign headquarters is located in a small shopfront on a deserted street in Holmesburg, a neighbourhood on the city’s northeastern outskirts. The walls were plastered with pictures of Donald Trump, and above the desk of the campaign officers was a small whiteboard with “27 days to victory” scribbled on it. I signed up for the event in the hope of being a fly on the wall.
Lauren, a young woman wearing a leather jacket and high boots, said proudly she’d already knocked on 160 doors campaigning for Trump and was aiming to hit her target of 200. Adam, an older African-American man, had travelled all the way from Germantown for this event. He called himself a “music man” and was wearing a T-shirt under his hoodie that said “I love Trump because he pisses off all the people I don’t like”.
But the most intriguing member of this small group was Martha, a neatly dressed middle-aged woman with blonde bobbed hair, who had driven more than an hour from another town. She said that after talking to many of her Harris-supporting friends, she realised things were going in the “wrong direction” and that she needed to “get off my butt and do something”.
Next to Martha, Wayne, a middle-aged man wearing a lumberjack shirt and a red MAGA cap, offered his view on the Democrats: “When I look at their election commercials, they’re flat-out lies. How can they be allowed to do that? And Kamala is so vacuous. She knows nothing about politics and international relations.”
Martha responded, “But they’re the left-controlled mainstream media, and they’re so good at mass deception. Kamala is an expert at projection.”
Then it was Wayne’s turn: You know that Harris and Walz got on 60 Minutes and all that? Well, my mum used to watch 60 Minutes. God bless her, she passed last year. But in the past few years, she watched 60 Minutes, I’d sit down and watch with her. Then my blood started to boil, with all these lies, deception and propaganda. So I said, ‘Mom, I’m sorry I’ve got to leave. I can’t stand this anymore.'”
“Yes, the mainstream media on the left is all about indoctrination and censorship,” Martha said.
I asked Martha, “So where do you go if you want to find reliable and accurate information?”
“Well, I usually go to Twitter. Fox News is pretty good and NewsMax is good too,” she replied.
It became clear then that Martha and many other Trump supporters saw themselves as the underdogs, fighting against the mighty “mainstream” media on the left. For Martha, Fox News did not count as “mainstream”, despite having the highest viewership of any of the three big cable news networks for the 43rd consecutive month, ahead of MSNBC and CNN.
During my two-month stay in the United States, I had indeed overdosed on a diet of election coverage on cable television. My excuse was that despite the hype about this being a “TikTok election”, research suggests it will still be a “cable news election”, and fierce political battles are still being fought in the legacy media.
As I had anticipated, Fox News and NewsMax assiduously avoided reporting on anything the least bit unflattering of Trump, while doing their best to magnify the problems and issues facing Harris and the Democrats. At the other end of the spectrum, MSNBC regularly demonised Trump (with a lot of help from the Republican nominee himself), while also talking up the Democrats’ prospects.
On both ends of the spectrum, there is little diversity of views or genuine debate.
One Democrat voter in Philly gave this description of the media landscape in the US: “We’ve got MSNBC on the left, Fox on the right, but nothing in the middle.”
She was both right and wrong. On the one hand, there are many media outlets in between, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, CBS, CNN and many others. But on the other hand, while these outlets don’t side with Harris in quite the same way that MSNBC does, they do regularly air opinions that are mostly favourable to Harris.
It also seems an acceptable practice for media outlets such as NPR, CNN and The New York Times to label Trump simply as a liar. Rather than reporting what he says and following up with fact-checking (as Australia’s ABC generally aims to do), their reporters simply assert, “Trump lied again when he said…”
But given Trump is a proven habitual liar, should journalists still extend to him the ritual of objective reporting? This has been a significant debate since he arrived on the stage. Some people argue that by not having called out the Republican nominee more early on, reporters allowed his ascent. Now, it seems most of these “mainstream media on the left” have decided to cover Trump by going against conventional “objective” reporting and just “telling it like it is”.
Matthew Levendusky, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, helped me understand where Martha’s view of the “mainstream media on the left” comes from, stating that there has been a long-running Republican strategy of attacking the media that goes back to the time of Richard Nixon, although “Trump may be the apotheosis of that trend”.
Right-wing media such as Fox News and talk-back radio, as well as celebrity elites such as Elon Musk, have gone a long way towards eroding the American public’s trust in media. Conservative commentators for Fox and shock-jock radio frequently refer to outlets outside this ecosystem as the “mainstream media controlled by the left”.
“American society is so polarised” is the frequent refrain of many journalists, politicians, influential commentators and everyday citizens. But the reality may not be so simple.
While individuals who volunteer to campaign for either Trump or Harris are highly motivated and tend to have strong convictions, the majority of voters will either vote Republican despite their dislike of Trump, or Democrat despite their reservations about Harris. Many also may prefer one party over another but won’t turn up at the ballot box due to their ambivalence or indecisiveness about both candidates or some of their policies.
Research suggests that American society, like all other societies, has many shades of grey. Elite politics, engaged in by people who live and breathe politics, is polarised, and participants tend to use social media to amplify their extreme views, thus giving the impression that the entire society is divided. In reality, ordinary people think American society is much more polarised than it really is, and when it boils down to it, there’s more on which Americans agree than disagree.
Americans are on average moderate on most policy preferences. But the “culture wars” of politics involve insulting one another, which hides commonality by stirring up emotions attached to differences either in sensibility or social identity.
It is now a cliché to say that American society is polarised, but this is a bit of a myth. The reality may be that the media and social media create this impression through the growing trend towards partisanship across the board in their reporting.
