Journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who are famous for reporting on Watergate while working at the Washington Post, released a statement stating their disappointment. Former executive editor Martin Baron called the decision “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.” Nineteen Washington Post columnists signed an op-ed calling the lack of an endorsement a “terrible mistake.” And the unions of both publications released statements expressing their concern over such a move.

Across the board, the cited concern is that we are just days away from a consequential election where one of the candidates poses a major threat to democracy itself. The rest of the media see the billionaires who own each outlet as “preemptively self-censoring” themselves to avoid offending Donald Trump. This “self-censorship” then, we’re told, makes it more likely that Trump will get elected.

The assumptions that underlie these concerns are worth unpacking. The first, and perhaps most foolish notion, is that an endorsement from the LA Times or Washington Post will be a consequential factor in this election. The audience of both papers already skews heavily Democrat. Also, it is no mystery to anyone who spends as little as thirty seconds scrolling through editorial headlines that the papers’ editors support Harris over Trump, and why.

A short look at the opinion and news stories in either paper is also enough to dispel the notion that either outlet’s executives are worried about displeasing Trump. Even in the “hard news” sections, Trump is framed as an unhinged fascist set to destroy the country to nurse his fragile ego, while Harris is a serious, stern, problem-solving public servant who, at worst, has made a few tactical mistakes on the campaign trail. No honest observer can seriously say these papers are “staying silent” about this election.

Above all, the intensity of the meltdown we’re seeing from media figures both inside and outside of these two publications reveals how profoundly out-of-touch most of the establishment media is about their own importance.

There was a time, mainly back in the mid-to-late-1800s, when the public got virtually all its news from newspapers. It’s hard to overstate how much power that put in the hands of the printers, and later editors and executives, who produced these papers.

As we go about our lives, we are constantly building and refining an internal model of reality that helps us better act to achieve our desired ends. Much of this model is fashioned from our own experience or the experience of our friends and families—which gets shared with us through advice and stories. To understand all parts of the world that exist outside the experience of ourselves and those we personally know, we rely on media. In the nineteenth century, the media consisted almost exclusively of books, pamphlets, and newspapers.

Because our internal models of reality are indistinguishable from reality itself and newspapers were effectively the sole source of information about current events, newspaper editors exerted an enormous amount of control over how the population saw the world. And their near-monopoly over public discourse about current events gave them a lot of authority when analyzing or endorsing the actions of politicians.

As other forms of media gained traction, however, the dominance of newspapers began to wane. That started with magazines—the first truly national news outlets—and it really accelerated with the rise of radio and television news. But the high cost of starting a new publication and the government’s early seizure of the airwaves kept control over the information space mostly in the hands of a small, establishment-friendly group.

That changed in the 1990s with the introduction of internet blogs. Suddenly, anyone with an internet connection could reach readers without filters, editors, or space constraints. It wasn’t obvious at first, but with this one seemingly-innocuous development, the establishment’s monopoly on the information space was shattered forever.

Now, three decades later, the consequences of such a change are much harder to ignore. From Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, and the campaigns of Ron Paul and later Donald Trump at home, to the Arab Spring and the passage of Brexit abroad, the internet has changed the world. Not only because it allowed people to see and hear dissenting views, but because it showed people that those views were popular.

In an election this close, neither candidate has been able to ignore the new reality we find ourselves in. Both Harris and Trump have appeared on popular podcasts, with Trump making such appearances a central part of his campaign. Last week, Trump sat for a three-hour discussion on the Joe Rogan Experience, which is technically the most-watched talk show of any kind in the world by far.

Trump’s appearance on Rogan has been viewed nearly forty million times on YouTube alone (Spotify and Apple Podcasts don’t publish download numbers, but both also account for a large portion of Rogan’s listenership, so the total number is likely much higher.) The interview towers over Kamala Harris’s recent interview with Fox News, which, at 8 million viewers, had been celebrated as the highest-rated interview of the 2024 election. The internet is no longer a sideshow in our media environment. It’s the main stage.

Which is why it’s absurd to see an absolute meltdown over whether two newspapers print formal endorsements for one of the candidates. The panic can only be understood as a symptom of the legacy media being unable or unwilling to face the fact that they are no longer the main force influencing and controlling how the public sees the world.

The establishment press does still pose a serious threat with all the various ways they distort our perceptions of the truth in ways that are politically-expedient for them and their friends in government. But the hysteria last week over the withdrawn editorial endorsements demonstrates that many are still hyper-focused on some media practices that today are largely irrelevant. And that’s grounds for optimism.

Those numbers are not surprising to anyone who consumes a lot of political media. Tune into the establishment-friendly press and you’ll be inundated with stories about voter suppression in red states, recaps of the most dramatic skirmishes that happened outside the Capitol on January 6, and warnings about how Trump and his allies could actually take power after losing the upcoming election.

The fear, from the establishment’s perspective, is that after losing, Trump will successfully pressure Republican legislators in battleground states to appoint “alternate” electors that will keep Harris below the 270 electoral votes needed to win, which would send the election to the likely Republican-controlled House.

Without very explicit evidence of decisive voter fraud that the political class outright ignores, it’s hard to see a scheme like this working—considering that Trump isn’t already in power, Democrats have passed laws in recent years making it harder to appoint alternate electors, and many of the Republican legislators Trump would rely on have shown a reluctance to go along with the former president absent strong pressure from their constituents. But that hasn’t stopped the fear-mongering.

On the other side, the Trump-friendly alternative media is full of stories about local and state officials overturning election security laws, deleting drop box surveillance footage, actively registering non-citizens to vote, losing entire trays of mail-in ballots, and other tales of vote manipulation and even outright fraud.

Pair these stories with all the left’s freakouts about “voter suppression” in red states and the various assertions of foreign influence operations and it’s easy to see how so many voters became convinced that a victory by the other side would be illegitimate. Now add the establishment panic about a MAGA plot to overturn the election if they lose and the right’s awareness of the political establishment’s preparations to do the exact same thing had they lost in 2020 and it becomes clear why many are worried about what awaits us after election day.

The collapse of the public’s trust in elections mirrors the collapse in trust in several other institutions, like the federal judicial system, public health authorities, and the news media. While uncomfortable, the public losing trust in untrustworthy institutions is a good thing. It’s a necessary first step if the country is ever going to get on a better path.

The federal justice system has been used to go after the establishment’s political enemies since the beginning, public health authorities demolished any credibility they may have had with their deadly, totalitarian response to COVID-19, and the American news media has been actively misinforming the public in politically-expedient ways for essentially it’s entire history.

In the past decade or so, the American public has developed a much healthier level of skepticism toward these institutions. It is perfectly reasonable for that skepticism to carry over to federal elections.

After all, the political class—which includes politically-connected businesses—is making trillions of dollars in revenue thanks to various wars, innumerable regulations that protect them from competition, easy money from the Fed, and other lucrative government programs. It is not much of a jump to assume that, if able, the very people who have repeatedly lied us into unnecessary wars to line their pockets would be willing to use whatever means necessary to expand and protect their power and profits.

Together with the establishment-friendly media, the political class has placed a very high social cost on questioning the security of our elections in every instance except when it conveniently places the blame on a foreign government that Washington wants to demonize. Questioning the legitimacy of elections is “dangerous” unless you’re accusing Russia or Iran.

And whenever someone with a big enough voice casts doubt on past elections in an “unacceptable” way, the establishment is quick to shout them down with the same meaningless denunciation that there is no evidence of “widespread” election fraud.

Of course, if there were to be a conspiracy to either foment or permit voter fraud in a way that successfully flipped a national election, it would not be “widespread,” it would be targeted. Elections like this one come down to a handful of precincts—most of which are toss-up suburban and rural areas that surround blue cities in swing states. A conspiracy to commit or allow “widespread” voter fraud would be pointless and all but guarantee its discovery.

This is not to say you should accept every claim made about voter fraud or even that there is definitive proof that any previous elections were stolen in this fashion. And it’s certainly not to say that violence is an appropriate or productive response if the upcoming election appears like it was stolen.

Only that it would be healthy for more members of the American public to start questioning whether our system really works the way we learned it did in elementary school—where the president represents our collective will and acts as we would act to address the problems we face at home and abroad.

That simple story is an illusion that conveniently frames whatever the government is doing to us as an embodiment of everyone’s wishes and any opposition as a selfish stand against what everybody else wants. Many Americans are appropriately questioning a lot of what they’ve previously accepted as true. They ought to question this too.

Image Source: Mises Institute. Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.