Behind the Curtain: The big media era is over

Both campaigns have targeted small, often little-appreciated shards to reach hyper-specific pockets of potential voters. The campaigns are doing this with unorthodox, sometimes lengthy media appearances and precision ad targeting.

• Former President Trump reached way more potential male voters with his three-hour Rogan conversation (33 million views over the weekend) than he could have with a dozen or more appearances on Fox News, CNN and MSNBC combined. All three cable news networks skew very old in viewership, with median ages ranging from 67 to 70.
• Vice President Kamala Harris reached more young women on Alex Cooper's "Call Her Daddy" podcast, a show about sex and relationships, than she could on CBS' "60 Minutes" and ABC's "The View" combined. Both shows skew very old, too.
• Memes, prediction markets and long-form podcast interviews shape the conversation as surely as any front page.

This new fragmented reality is the future — not just of elections, but also for how America learns about business, products, technology, culture and current events.

• It's how reality will be shaped and "truths" hardened.
• It's where partisans will sharpen and spread their ideas — or lies.

• It's where trends and misinformation will be born and trafficked.
• It's where products and brands will be judged and sold.
• It's where a new generation of information stars are spawned.

(For a field guide to a dozen information bubbles, read our March column introducing the "shards of glass" phenomenon)

The big picture: When we speak around the country, we often tell audiences that when you're sitting at a table of people of different ages and politics, several of them probably get their information on platforms you've never visited ... from popular influencers you've never heard of ... on topics that might seem exotic or totally new.

• Big, traditional media still has its moments — presidential debates, town halls and sit-down interviews. But even then, most of the narrative-shaping is done in quick-twitch video bites or reinterpretation on podcasts, social platforms or YouTube.

Behind the scenes: Top executives and officials tell us that reaching people ages 35 and under with any message — or even major event — is almost impossible. Or they've seen an eight-second clip with no context, so they have a very different understanding of what happened than someone who saw a mainstream report. These are the TV cord-cutters, living in fractured communities on Instagram, TikTok and streaming audio.

• Ben LaBolt, White House communications director and senior adviser, told us: "Whether you're president or CEO, when you reach the [network] evening news, you're only hitting [a total of] 20 million Americans — and we've increasingly found that Americans 35 and under aren't consuming news from traditional outlets at all."
• "Video platforms, influencer engagements and streaming of all forms — especially podcasts — must be part of your media mix to reach a younger, diverse, persuadable demographic," LaBolt added.

Inside the campaigns: Harris focuses on traditional media more than Trump does. But her staff is equally focused on chopping her appearances into small clips.

• When she sat down with "60 Minutes," her comments about owning a Glock (quickly clipped and posted by her campaign) soon had 1 million views on TikTok.
• This shift — partly a reaction to plummeting trust in traditional media, partly the reality of younger people gobbling up news/info on new platforms — has reordered the information ecosystem at an epic scale.

Axios Media Trends author Sara Fischer, who tracks the business of media better than anyone, walked through but a few recent examples of the new world order:

• Harris targeted undecided Latinos on Nueva Network with Stephanie "Chiquibaby" Himonidis for a radio interview last month. Nueva is the largest independently owned Spanish-language audio network in the U.S.
• Harris reached young Black men on the NBA-focused "All the Smoke" podcast, hosted by Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson.
• She aimed for young Black women on "The Shade Room," an online culture brand that reaches primarily young Black people.

• Harris taped an interview last Thursday in Georgia with former NFL player Shannon Sharpe for his podcast "Club Shay Shay."

Trump's long-form interviews put a premium on young conservative, libertarian or agnostic men.

• He appeared on a livestream with controversial streamer Adin Ross — hosted on the niche live streaming video platform Kick, which is known for looser moderation than a rival like Twitch. At its peak, it had over 580,000 viewers.
• Trump sat for podcasts with comedian and actor Theo Von, comedian Andrew Schulz's "Flagrant" and Barstool Sports' "Bussin' with the Boys," hosted by former NFL football players Will Compton and Taylor Lewan. The Theo Von conversation racked up 14 million views on YouTube, the nation's most powerful video platform.
• Trump also went on Logan Paul's "Impaulsive" podcast — reportedly a recommendation from Trump's 18-year-old son, Barron.

What's next: TV is dying, slowly but surely. The audience for TV is old and shrinking. That's even changing where the candidates spend their TV budgets.

• "Political ads used to be all local broadcast essentially. Now it's CTV [connected TV] and streaming and digital," Fischer says.

Threat level: When attention is scattered across scores of shards, it's easier to propagate conspiracy theories and manipulate "news." It's way harder to catch Russian misinformation campaigns when they are unleashed inside a dozen different information bubbles.

• It also makes it harder to operate a divided and diffuse population on shared facts or truths.
• America's new challenge: Can a land of 50 different states thrive with 50 different info-ecosystems — and realities?

Reality check: Jeffrey Katzenberg — the legendary Hollywood executive, who's a co-chair of the Harris campaign — advocated for her heavy use of nontraditional outlets. "You gotta fish where the fish are," he told us. "They're not on cable and they're not on broadcast. They're not watching and not listening."

• But Katzenberg said legacy news organizations still set major national narratives — that then filter out to the masses through fractured information bubbles. He said old-school outlets are still "the top of the waterfall, but no longer have the ability to reach the customer, the consumer, the people. They give context and relevance and focus and priority — then the tidal wave happens."

The winner of the election might speed or slightly slow this lightning-fast transition. If Harris wins, she and her staff are much closer — and responsive — to traditional media. If Trump wins, the shift will accelerate.

• Just imagine, if Trump wins, the power of Elon Musk after he bought Twitter, and turned it into X — and then went all-in to elect Trump. The X-Rogan-right-wing podcaster network would form a new mass media industrial complex.