• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, December 31, 2024

For most year-end most-read stories columns I do a simple photo collage, but for this year's "Red, White & Blog" post-analysis, I figured I'd utilize the "Red, White & News" grid I introduced earlier this year, because that's what many of the most-reads actually were.

A few readers have asked me if I planned to utilize the format going forward into 2025, and its new political regime, and the answer is: absolutely.

Graphic delineations aside, the most-read "Red, White & Blog" of 2024 was my September 11th "Size Matters, Character Too" piece analyzing President Barack Obama's "weird obsession" dig at Trump, which I used another well-known graphic delineation -- Fallon McElligott Rice's "perception/reality" format for its classic Rolling Stone magazine ads -- to illustrate.

Much of my commentary for the year related to criticism of increasingly authoritarian/pro-Russia Trump wing of the Republican party, which now seems like a Pyrrhic effort in retrospect.

But if you ask me what the most important column of the year was, it was my February 13th "Anti-Democratization of Media" column updating a correlation I do periodically calling out the connection between the proliferation of digital media and the decline of democracies around the world.

My favorite guest contributors were Ed DeNicola's prediction science analyses (including this post-analysis of why even that got it so wrong), and James Forr's column schooling Democrats on where they should go from here.

My favorite headlines were:

• God Made Rick Wilson

• Chto yest', to yest'*

• 31 Flavors And Frozen Embryo Ain't One

• A Priest, A Rabbi And A Minister Walk Into A Voting Booth

• Don't Read This Column

• Other Than That, Mrs. Biden, How Was The Debate? (Technically, a "TVBlog" filling in for Adam Buckman that day.)

• It's A Good Life