But it is a third theory for Trump’s resounding victory, posited by many on the left, that should cause grave concern to liberty lovers because it forewarns of an acceleration of efforts to control the marketplace of ideas. Here, Harris’ loss was blamed not on the far-left policies and candidate voters rejected or on the supposed racist and sexist beliefs of the electorate, but on voters purportedly being “misinformed” by the right-wing controlled media.

By the end of last week, this theme had flooded the airways and social media. But it was the New Republic’s article, “Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?,” that best capsulated this spin.

The New Republic’s article from Thursday declared the purported “reason” for Trump’s victory: “It wasn’t the economy. It wasn’t inflation, or anything else. It was how people perceive those things, which points to one overpowering answer.” “The answer is the right-wing media,” author Michael Tomasky pontificated, continuing:

“Today, the right-wing media — Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more — sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.”

This argument was laughable to conservatives and Republicans who, unlike many of their liberal and Democrat contemporaries, do not limit their news intake to coverage from like-minded media outlets. Thus, the right saw what statistics bore out — “that broadcast evening news coverage of the 2024 presidential race has been the most lopsided in history,” with legacy outlets, like ABC, CBS and NBC, providing Harris “78% positive coverage, while these same networks have pummeled former Republican President Donald Trump with 85% negative coverage.”

The legacy networks also hosted and controlled the presidential and vice-presidential debates, providing even more skewed coverage of the competing candidacies. And these media outlets regularly pushed — or unquestioningly accepted — false and misleading claims about Trump and Vance.

The repetitive false reporting that Donald Trump had called neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville “very fine people” — a claim even debunked by Snopes — alone proves the point. But ordinary Americans, having lived through the Russia collusion hoax and the false claims that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation, and also having witnessed the blatant bias of the networks during the debate, no longer needed solid proof to question the veracity of the legacy outlets. And the populace then turned to alternative media to assess the truth.

Herein, we saw the difference about 2024: It isn’t that the right controls the media or misinforms the populace, but that the left no longer can — at least not unimpeded.