A March 2025 conference hosted by the Character Assassination Research Lab at George Mason University provided the occasion to examine how the corporate media perpetuated gender biases and polarizing narratives during the 2024 US election cycle, stoking the manufactured culture wars and culture of contempt. Biased reporting not only normalized “othering” during the campaign cycle, but helped fuel the anger, self-righteousness, and projection of superiority that some individuals and groups held over targeted others.
The first Trump presidency saw a marked rise in hate crimes in the US and a surge in threats to elected officials, online and offline. Since Trump and Musk entered the White House in 2025, divisive othering has advanced from trash talk to targeted assaults on individuals, groups, and the civil liberties and protections once considered incontrovertible in the US, putting contempt and retribution on full display.
Media coverage of the 2024 election
Much of the coverage of the 2024 presidential campaign cycle reflected partisan and gender biases, enabling character attacks and the weaponization of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). As contentious attitudes, beliefs, and maladaptive communication and behavior tactics were platformed throughout social and legacy media, character attacks became normalized. Through media’s platforming of name-calling, insults, stereotypes, false accusations of wrong-doing, and misconstrued revelations of personal information, public attacks on the character of individuals and groups helped shape public opinion and voting choices.
Media’s boosting of hot button topics over more universal concerns elevated the seeming importance of those topics in the public consciousness. When disinformation and character attacks are strategically repeated in the media, shock factor fades. Desensitized, the attention of news consumers and voters gets focused on made-up culture war topics instead of the more consequential societal concerns and candidate promises.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion under fire
Reports from Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders showed that online hate and harassment of women, especially women journalists and politicians, increased after 2020. Amnesty International has been analyzing gendered abuse online most notably since 2018 when it identified Twitter (now X), as a toxic platform for women. After the 2024 election, online abuse of women soared. The top posts on X, TikTok, Facebook, and Reddit were ‘repeal the 19th [Amendment],’ ‘get back to the kitchen,’ and ‘your body, my choice.’
Post-election, Meta’s eager embrace of the Trump-Musk slash-and-burn administration and cancellation of Meta’s content moderation and DEI policies are perpetuating identity-based abuses online that have the potential to spark violence offline. The break-in and arson attack on the Pennsylvania governor’s home in April 2025 is a case in point. The suspect’s social media posts of Molotov cocktails manifested in real life when the suspect threw several into the governor’s home.
The decimation of DEI is an assault on civil liberties and universal human rights and is a prime example of a culture war narrative. Online abuse reflects a broader culture of contempt in which people are singled out and openly subjected to scapegoating, character attacks, investigations, and firings. In 2025, the culture wars are being conducted by the federal government and Big Tech, slashing policies, personnel and funds at the Federal Aviation Administration, the Defense Department, the Internal Revenue Service, and the US Agency for International Development, to name a few, and across federally-funded universities and schools.
The 2024 election opened the floodgates
US politics is a popularity contest that deploys double standards for women and gender nonconforming individuals who are judged, and considered likeable or not, based on their appearance, age, and other external traits. Likeability is a catch-22 for women, trans, and nonbinary individuals in the public eye, as they must prove their qualifications without seeming self-promotional. When the media focus on popularity and polls, they neglect journalistic ethics and standards, increasing public distrust of the political system and the press that’s supposed to hold that system to account.
Decades of research on media coverage of US politics has shown gender biases that favor straight, white, male politicians and candidates. There are more men in politics, and therefore men receive more quantifiable press and more positive press than women, trans and nonbinary persons.
Since women entered national politics, perceptions of their physical attractiveness and youthfulness have garnered as much or more media attention than their talents, experience, and qualifications. The corporate press perpetuates the gender gap in US politics, reinforces traditional gender roles, and decreases perceptions of women’s likeability, competency, and agency—the very qualities by which voters evaluate candidates. Leadership traits that are positively associated with masculinity, such as assertiveness and competitiveness, skew negatively for women, demanding women in politics to be as competent and talented as their male counterparts, but also warm, gentle, and nurturing.
In 2020, after Joe Biden announced Harris as his running mate, a coalition of advocacy groups issued a letter titled “We Have Her Back,” urging news media executives and bureau chiefs around the nation to focus on Harris’s expertise, not her physical traits. Despite this, the establishment press fixated on all the things about Kamala Harris that they were advised against.
Corporate coverage of Kamala Harris
Some examples from 2020 to 2024 include a Cosmopolitan article titled, “The Politics Behind…Kamala Harris’s Hair.” Coverage delved into whether Harris wore a wig, if she had a ‘silk press,’ and if it would be controversial to wear curly hair. Harris’s signature pearl jewelry occupied as much bandwidth as her hair. An example from Women’s Wear Daily editorialized on her supposed “love affair with pearls.” And during the September 2024 debate with Trump, conspiracies spread, claiming her pearl earrings were “earphones.” They were not.
It only got worse after a New York Times headline from July 2024 framed Harris’s laugh as a “campaign issue.” Conservative white pundits and social media users called her laugh inappropriate, crazy, and exaggerated.
Then came the attacks on her race when Trump, Vance, and other leading Republicans—notably Tennessee representative, Tim Burchett—challenged Harris’s Black and Asian heritage, labelling her a “DEI hire.” NBC, Fox, and others in the white-dominated corporate press jumped on the messaging.
Republican Louisiana senator, John Kennedy, called Harris a “ding-dong” on Fox News. According to calculations by Salon, Kennedy repeated the comment six times in the ten-minute segment. A July 2024 NBC clip proclaimed, “‘Dumb’ and ‘DEI’ candidate: Trump allies attack Kamala Harris based on race, gender.”
Also in July, as hard as the conservative right was pushing Harris as a DEI hire, Trump pushed even harder at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABL) event in July 2024, claiming that Harris had only recently “become a Black person.” Following suit, headline after headline demanded, “Is She Black or Indian?”
Trump escalated the culture war by launching a social media attack on Rachel Scott of ABC News who had moderated the NABL event and called out Trump’s inflammatory speech and lies about Black politicians and journalists. Obeying his dog whistle, Trump supporters assailed Scott with death threats.
Self-proclaimed “white advocate” and “proud Islamaphobe,” Laura Loomer, made headlines after posting on social media that “if Harris becomes President, the White House ‘will smell like curry.’” Since Trump’s return to the White House, Loomer not only visited but was apparently behind Trump’s firing of Timothy Haugh, head of the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command, and other National Security Council officials Loomer deemed “disloyal” (i.e.. Biden appointments with bipartisan confirmations).
Dogs and cats
J.D. Vance’s campaign trail “childless cat lady” trope was another dog whistle. Aligning himself with Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly to further his demagoguery, the cat lady bombast signaled Vance’s readiness “to play to misogyny for the right audience.”
Vance pushed his claim that Harris and other so-called barren women have no stake in the future of the United States, portraying Democrats as “anti-child” and Republicans as “pro-family.” During the campaign cycle, his accusations gained traction across the media spectrum. Even CNN and NPR played the role of Vance-apologist, each detailing possible rationales for his cat lady commentary, none of which included Vance’s proposal to give more voting power to parents or that the Right’s birthrate obsession is rooted in white supremacy.
Critical media literacy and independent journalism as countermeasures
The Right has now twice-enthroned Trump, regressed women’s rights and gender norms, and is busy dismantling press freedom, the public’s right to know, and rule of law.
The corporate media’s conduct pre- and post-election and normalization of dangerous ideas and harmful rhetoric speak to the media’s role in agenda-setting and public opinion formation, highlighting the national need for critical media literacy education and public interest journalism to disrupt the narratives fueling the culture of contempt. Grounded in critical and social justice theories, critical media literacy provides a line of inquiry that looks beneath the surface-level presentation of a news story or public character attack. Independent, investigative, ethical journalism is less prone to agenda-setting, one-sided framing, and rhetorical devices, and often provides information absent from the corporate media.
Partisan and corporate media’s biased reporting underscore the conservative patriarchal control in Washington, DC politics and among the nation’s most influential news outlets. Media messaging is intentionally constructed, and intrinsically tied to issues of identity, agency, and self-perception, influencing public opinion and voting decisions. Thus, turning a critical lens on partisan and attack-type reporting means asking key questions about power, funding, and affiliation.
By refining one’s own critical media literacy skills and seeking out ethical, independent journalism, news consumers are more apt to encounter diverse perspectives, see through character attacks, and help advance a culture that values human and civil rights for everyone. Serving as both individual empowerment and collective action, a critically media literate public can be a countervailing force against the authoritarian manufacture of contempt.
Mischa Geracoulis is the Managing Editor at Project Censored and its publishing imprint The Censored Press, a contributor to Project Censored’s State of the Free Press yearbook series, and a Project Judge.