The Messaging Fixation

This week brought a largely unnoticed but telling adjustment in the American media landscape. John Dickerson—a serious journalist, respected across ideological lines—was removed from the CBS nightly news lineup, a decision widely attributed to pressure from executives eager to align more comfortably with the new conservative media ecosystem. ABC and NBC, meanwhile, appear to be treading carefully themselves.

It is worth pausing over what this consolidation reveals. The administration has shown little sustained interest in improving material conditions—on inflation, tariffs, healthcare costs, or public safety—but remains intensely focused on messaging. The story must be controlled: about the economy, about drug trafficking on the high seas, about Jeffrey Epstein, about anything at all, provided it distracts from the lived experience of the public.

This approach is not without precedent. Fox News and its ideological cousins played an indispensable role in rehabilitating Donald Trump after January 6 and countless prior scandals. Social media platforms—Facebook foremost, Twitter famously—were equally essential in amplifying narratives that converted grievance into votes. The lesson drawn from this success appears to be that messaging alone can substitute for governance.

But there are limits. Tariffs raise prices. Inflation erodes wages. Masked federal agents in cities unsettle even sympathetic citizens. Healthcare premiums, by most accounts, are poised to rise sharply. No amount of narrative discipline can fully obscure these realities. And while efforts to influence cable news may succeed at the margins, platforms like YouTube and TikTok—still largely resistant to centralized control—continue to expose Americans to what is actually happening.

If messaging fails, the temptation may be to escalate: to tighten control further, to narrow permissible speech, to confuse reporting with disloyalty. One hopes it does not come to that.

The deeper danger, however, lies beyond the immediate political moment. Media distortion does not merely delay accountability; it impedes recovery. When the causes of economic and social harm are misdiagnosed—when blame is reassigned to convenient enemies rather than structural choices—solutions become impossible.

After all, if a candidate can survive impeachments, insurrection, indictments, bankruptcies, and convictions through sheer narrative resilience, then restoring a shared sense of truth may prove harder than restoring any institution. The most enduring legacy of the Trump era may not be policy at all, but a post-truth politics in which grievance replaces evidence, and a permanently aggrieved constituency is told—endlessly—that it is the true victim of the age.