Conservatives like to gloat when legacy media outlets lay off journalists or, better yet, shut their doors for good. The Right claims that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now X, was a turning point for free speech and will forever change how voters get their news, but the death of the corporate press may have been greatly exaggerated. 

To be fair, this election will test the power of the press. We are about to find out if former President Donald Trump’s 2016 victory over corporate media’s candidate, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was an aberration or if it was the beginning of the end for the Democratic Party’s Praetorian Guard. 

The Harris-Walz ticket, by far the most radical ticket in modern American history, will live or die based on the efficacy of the media’s propaganda. Democrats nominated a candidate who didn’t receive a single primary vote after using the press to strong-arm the sitting president, and the winner of every Democratic primary and caucus, into dropping out of the race.

Vice President Kamala Harris became the presumptive nominee 19 days ago and has yet to receive a single question of importance from a journalist, and she will almost certainly continue to avoid serious questions, at least until Democrats can run up the score via early voting.

Harris was the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate during her brief tenure in Congress, raised money to bail out rioters during the 2020 race riots, and utterly failed when she was tasked by President Joe Biden to fix the southern border. Journalists believe it is their duty to protect their nominee from harsh questioning on all these fronts. 

Harris tapped as her running mate Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), a man who inflated his rank in the Minnesota National Guard and led voters to believe he saw combat for political gain.

Walz allowed roaming bands of street communists to burn the Twin Cities to the ground during the George Floyd riots; supports taxpayer-funded abortion up to the point of birth, gender transitions for children, a ban on fracking, and tyrannical gun control; and even set up a Stalin-inspired hotline on which Democrats could snitch on their friends and neighbors for going to church or their places of business during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Surely, these factors would make Walz radioactive with independent voters in swing states, but the press will dutifully protect their man from any and all criticism. 

Trump is running a centrist campaign. He pledged never to sign a nationwide abortion ban and to leave the failing entitlement programs alone to die a society-shaking death. Trump’s foreign policy is similar to the Biden-Harris doctrine but with more cash to Israel and perhaps less to Ukraine. But the money would still flow, and Lockheed Martin shareholders would still profit.

At Trump’s direction, the GOP scrubbed all Second Amendment protections, protections for the unborn, and all talk of reducing federal spending from the 2024 party platform. Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), while a bomb thrower on social issues, is an economic leftist, more akin to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) than former Rep. Ron Paul, but you wouldn’t know any of that if you get your news from the corporate press. 

New York Times readers and viewers of the major networks are convinced that Project 2025, a fever dream written by Trump fans at the Heritage Foundation, would be Trump’s blueprint for governance despite the fact that the former president has repeatedly denounced the document and governed like a 1990s Democrat in his first term.

Casual observers are being inundated with claims that Walz is a centrist despite every available piece of evidence insisting otherwise. Voters will never hear Harris answer the million-dollar question: What did she know about President Joe Biden’s senility, and when did she know?

The most important event in modern American politics, the near-assassination of Trump, won’t grace corporate media headlines again until after the election. 

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Voters have a clear choice: a centrist Republican ticket, which would likely give Democrats as many victories as Republicans if given the opportunity, or the most radical, fringe ticket since at least the McGovern campaign in 1972.

The press will use their influence to muddy the water as much as physically possible over the next three months. Will it work? Time will tell. 

Brady Leonard (@bradyleonard) is a musician, political strategist, and host of The No Gimmicks Podcast.