Opinion | For Trump and Harris, the Media Future Is Now

In 2015, Barack Obama submitted to interviews with three YouTube stars, one of whom was notable for eating cereal out of a bathtub.It was a moment that opened a window into the media landscape of the future, after the mainstream media as we have known it — while also making that future seem basically absurd.A year later Donald Trump won the White House, and there was a rush to find the sources of his victory in the darker reaches of the internet, in misinformation factories and troll farms.

It was another window into the media future — but this time the future seemed dystopian, a realm of propaganda and manipulation.In 2024, the media future doesn’t need to be seen through a glass darkly: For the younger generation of news consumers, it has basically arrived.But it isn’t embodied by cereal-eating YouTubers, Russian-funded disinformation operations or even the Silicon Valley-enforced progressive censorship that many conservatives feared four years ago.Instead it’s embodied by the sex-and-relationships podcaster and the bro comedians who scored important interviews with Kamala Harris and Donald Trump this month — with the host of “Call Her Daddy,” Alex Cooper, tossing Harris questions about abortion and student loans, while the comics Andrew Schulz and Akaash Singh chatted with Trump about his nicknaming strategy on their show, “Flagrant.”As a conservative with an interest in moral decline, I was familiar with “Call Her Daddy,” but I confess I had never heard of “Flagrant” before clips from the Trump interview started populating my social media feed.

Which is par for the course for this campaign: The nominees and their running mates have consistently submitted to interviews with shows and personalities who were barely on my radar screen.There’s an impulse to interpret these media arrivistes as reinventions of the prior media dispensation — to cast a big podcaster like Joe Rogan as a muscled Walter Cronkite for the online age, or to fr...