MOST people around the world followed the just concluded American presidential contest no doubt because of the global curiosity over Donald Trump. Every person on planet earth wanted to know if he would win because if he did, then how do you explain his victory?

The reason why people felt he couldn’t win was because Trump’s relentless detractor was the American corporate media. The American mainstream went after Trump as soon as he became president in 2016. Given the power of the mainstream media in the US, how was it possible for Trump to win in 2024? And they went after him, this time with more emotional outpouring.

And Trump beat them. Trump received gargantuan bad-mouthing from the American mainstream media yet handsomely won last week. How do you explain that? And the Guyanese analysts need to transport that analysis to Guyana. That the US media are no longer the powerhouse in the art of subliminal effect is testimony to a world that has changed beyond recognition from the 1970s when media mogul Rupert Murdoch alone decided who would become the Prime Minister of the UK.

Read the biographies of Murdoch and you will see the global reach this man had. One book said politicians used to line up in front of his house to get him to use his newspapers so they could become Prime Minister. So, hear what CNN analyst, Van Jones wrote on why Kamala Harris lost: “We got beat because the conservatives and Republicans built a different media system. It had to do with online, had to do with podcasts, with streaming platforms. And they were spending their money there.”

This is today’s world. The era of the dominance of the rich, biased, racist, anti-Black, anti-Third World rich media corporations is gone, and maybe forever. It has been replaced by social media. The Washington Post brought down an American president, Richard Nixon. The post and the rest of the American media cannot bring down a president today because for every word they write against a sitting president, more people will listen and watch his defence on social media.

The defence of that president on social media will be more penetrating than anything written in the New York Times. And talking about the Times and the Post – they are in big trouble. They are hemorrhaging dozens of millions each year from their printed paper.

I go to the seawall every night with my doggie. As soon as you step out of your car, all you see are people of all ages and of all stripes, with their phones using social media. So, I was going eastward from the bandstand and this group just yelled out to me: “Hi Mr. Kissoon, we were just watching you, and here you are in front of us.”

They were looking at the Freddie Kissoon Show. Then another night, going eastward again, this gentleman and his lady friend with their phone in hand said to me as I passed them: “Mr. Kissoon, your friend, David Hinds, was just criticising you.” They were looking at social media.

Let’s transport the failure of corporate journalism to dislodge Trump to Guyana where the Stabroek News (SN) thinks it can help to defeat the PPP in 2025. I have written three times on this page, if the SN could have influenced people from voting for the PPP it should have been in the 2023 local government election.

The vituperative, acidic ranting against the PPP by SN editorials since the Ali presidency was born in August 2020 is inexorable. It has not stopped since then. But the PPP made pyrotechnical incursions into traditional PNC strongholds.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.