Rob Flaherty, deputy campaign manager for the Harris-Walz team, is conceding that corporate media outlets are increasingly irrelevant. “There’s just no value—with respect to my colleagues in the mainstream press—in a general election, to speaking to The New York Times or speaking to The Washington Post, because those [readers] are already with us,” he said.

WaPo owner Jeff Bezos offered similar views after he controversially blocked his newspaper’s planned endorsement of Harris, telling furious subscribers, “[Newspaper] endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None.”

Flaherty told Semafor that the “reason folks are seeking alternative sources of media and are turning away from political news is because they don’t trust our institutions. They don’t trust elites, they don’t trust the media, they don’t trust all this stuff.”S

He insisted the solution for Democratic candidates is “not as simple as, like, ‘Go to Joe Rogan and talk about how great democracy is and the importance of preserving the independence of the DOJ,’ or whatever,” explaining, “You’ve got to speak their language.”

PODCASTS.

He said he believes there are “plenty of cultural touchpoints” that Democrats could draw from, noting that “Joe Rogan was, at least recently, for Medicare for All” and that “Theo Von is really against money in politics and the way that pharma has flooded our communities with opioids.”

“Those are all things that Democrats have something to say on,” he suggested—but despite this supposed understanding of the audience Democrats have to connect with, it was Trump’s team, not Harris’s, that appeared on Joe Rogan and Theo Von’s podcasts.

Flaherty did not discount the corporate media entirely, insisting, “One of the most important moments of the campaign for the Vice President was her interview with Bret Baier” on Fox News.

However, the Democrat may have learned the wrong lessons from the encounter–one of a vanishingly small number of non-softball interviews Harris took– describing it as a “huge fundraising moment” and “a huge social moment” despite a widespread perception that the appearance was a disaster.

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