On today’s Weekly Rural Preview Live, we talked a lot about the Correspondents’ Dinner tomorrow, and about how American mainstream media has largely failed to meet the authoritarian moment we are currently living in.
The Correspondents’ Dinner was always kind of insane to me. The last thing we need in our democracy is a press corps more concerned with being friends with powerful people than with holding power accountable.
A dinner like this, even under the most optimal democratic conditions, is inappropriate. It goes against every journalistic standard taught to high school students in every American public school.
But this year it feels not just outrageous. It feels irrelevant.
Every election cycle over the last 20 years, the Washington press corps has lost a little more touch with the day-to-day struggles of the American voters they claim to represent. Now it seems they have completely locked themselves under Trump’s golden dome of the Beltway bubble.
We are now in a world where truth costs you a subscription to Jeff Bezos, or whatever billionaire owns the institutions we were told would protect our democracy, while lies and AI slop on social media pad the profits of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.
In that environment, traditions like the Correspondents’ Dinner strike me as more egregious than ever. The idea of watching a television show about journalists dining with politicians and seeing a state-sponsored magician seems like something straight out of the 1900s.
Trust in the media is at an all-time low. That is what the polling shows, and that is what we have known for some time.
Conventional wisdom holds that when media trust collapses, voters are manipulated. Authoritarianism wins. Democracy loses.
And yet something is happening that runs counterintuitive to what we might expect.
Americans are turning more and more against Donald Trump. And it seems his takeover of the Washington press corps isn’t helping to reverse the trend. It’s almost like voters don’t really pay attention to the Washington press.
You might think that in an environment where the media has become less relevant, democracy would also be in decline. But that is not what we are seeing in the numbers. More and more Americans are waking up to the anti-democratic, pro-authoritarian tendencies of the Trump administration. Why?
I think it is happening because Americans are craving community like never before.
When you cannot trust the news, and you cannot trust the algorithm, the only thing left to trust is the people around you in your daily life — and your bank account. Reality is breaking through our news feeds because reality is what people share with each other when the institutions stop working.
Donald Trump built his career on the backs of social influencers, and from 2016 to 2026, Americans went along for the ride. We glued ourselves to our screens, waiting for the next hot take.
But social media use has also been in decline since the pandemic. The influencer ride is over. Five years out of COVID, Americans are missing the communities we had back in the good old days. Back when people got together for neighborhood gatherings, went to see a local musician at a local venue, or even went to the movie theater with friends. It feels like a different era.
Everywhere I go, that is what I hear from people, especially in small towns and rural communities. I just heard it in Wenatchee, Washington, from local Democratic county chairs at the Washington State Dems Rural Summit. I heard it earlier this month from party activists at the ASDC meeting in New Orleans.
When the institutions Americans used to rely on for connection — local newspapers, civic groups, even the local bar with its mix of regulars — disappear, people rebuild what they lost. They are doing it now. Across America over the last two years, I have seen a resurgence of community-focused organizing.
We always talk about community organizing and go straight to the organizing part of the equation. But the community has to come first. That is what we are doing at Rural Organizing. That is what our friends at our sister 501(c)(3), Rural Progress, are focusing on with the Backroads Tour.
It is all about non-partisan community building and remembering the values that built this country and that we have aspired to over the last 250 years.
Earlier this week, I had a chance to sit down with Susan J. Demas at Lincoln Square, and we talked about all of this. It was a really great conversation. You can watch the full video here.
And on today’s livestream, it’s what we talked about, too.
