Commentary

The Most Red - Er, I Mean Read - White & Blogs

by Joe Mandese , December 29, 2025

One of the greatest indignations I've had as political media trade reporter covering Trump has been the way he appropriated -- and twisted -- some of the greatest American campaign themes ever conceived: Ronald Reagan's. And I have a feeling many of you think so too. Which would help explain why my Oct. 24 post("It's Moron Again In America") about Trump calling off trade talks with our largest trading partner -- you know, the one to the north that is NOT our 51st state -- all because the province of Ontario ran a commercial using archival Reagan footage to make a point about Trump's erratic tariffs policy. (As you might imagine, Reagan was not a fan of tariffs.)

The second most-read blog post was my Jan. 21 column ("Democracy Dies In Overplaying News Safety") based on Stagwell research released at Davos, which showed three-quarters of marketers feel they should spend more -- not less -- advertising on news programming. The piece also presaged Omnicom's and Interpublic''s capitulation to refrain from using its own bias to determine where its clients spend their ad dollars.

No. 3 was my Jan. 20 post ("Hybrid Warfare: A Post-Buy Analysis") about a Stagwell analysis of the rapidly accelerating use of "hybrid" political ads combining issues advertising with a candidate's. The practice, according to Assembly Director of Political Strategy Tyler Goldberg is an ingenious loophole enabling issue ads to qualify for a candidate's Federal Election Commission-regulated lowest ad unit rates, making their campaign dollars stretch farther, but also depriving media outlets of premium rates and devouring access to inventory that might otherwise have gone to general brand advertisers.

It's also a new way of exploiting "Dark Money" to generate more reach, part of a practice I label as "Dark Media."

But if you ask me, the most ingenious use of media during the early days of the new Trump administration was my Jan. 24 column ("Make America Wayback Again") about the creative editorial team at TheSkimm who figured out how to scrape the entire federal website about reproductive rights after Trump shut it down. By using Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, the team recreated reproductiverights.gov under a new domain, ReproductiveRightsDotGov.com.

I'm not sure if anyone else has followed the model, but if you know of any, let me know and I'll do a column about them too.

Rounding out the five most-read posts of the year was my Sept. 17 post ("Then They Came For The Late Night Hosts And I Did Not Speak Out...") paying homage to German pastor Martin Niemöller's Nazi-era poem, "First They Came," in the wake of FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's pressure campaign to get Jimmy Kimmel suspended, as well as the administration's presumed role in Paramount's firing of Stephen Colbert.

government, media, politics

4 comments about "The Most Red - Er, I Mean Read - White & Blogs".

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Tony Jarvis from Olympic Media Consultancy, December 30, 2025 at 12:46 p.m.
Joe: Another brilliant year of reporting - and a well deserved standing "O" and thank-you. Elbows-up!
Reply

Dan C. from MS Entertainment, December 30, 2025 at 1:11 p.m.

Referring to yourself as a "political media trade reporter" is pretty rich. I don't see reporting. I see lots of biased commentary, but I don't see any actual journalism.

Would love to see the numbers behind your most read posts which are commentaries vs. actual MP news.

Transparency and all that.

Joe Mandese from MediaPost Inc., December 30, 2025 at 2:33 p.m.

@Dan C. from MS Entertainment: Heh-heh, I can always count on you to express something debasing, can't I. Not sure how it helps the discussion, but just to fact-check a couple of points you may not understand: 1) I've covered political media and marketing for nearly half a century at Adweek, Ad Age, and yes -- even journalistically at MediaPost. It has always been one of my beats. That might be why my publisher asked me to take over "Red, White & Blog" to provide my own opinion-based commentary. By the way, opinions are inherently biased and Ive never implied mine were any different. As always, if you don't like reading them, why do you -- and why do you take the time to troll -- er, I mean comment -- about them?

Lastly, opinions have always been a part of journalist. In fact, news organizations often have whole sections devoted to them. They're called "op-eds" and even though we call "Red, White & Blog" a blog, it is an op-ed commentary.

Hope that clarifies things for you, but I'm sure this comment will be repeated in some form sometimes soon.

Happy New Year!

Kenny Kurtz from Persuasion Marketing And Media replied, January 5, 2026 at 7:47 p.m.

News? What is news these days anyway? Love Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain. For the Dan C's of the world, and everybody else for that matter, "news" is anything that supports what is already believed. When we receive such supportive "news," our brains deliver nice dopamine hits (making us more dopey, and less willing to dive deeper for actual truth). 29% of the age-eligible, and citizenship-eligible people in this country voted for pathological liar trump in the last election. They get dopamine hits to their brains every time that despicable douchebag opens his mouth to tell another whopper, double, triple, or quadruple down on whoppers already told. So much dopamine, and so many dopes...