One thing that became abundantly clear since former President Donald Trump's entry into politics is the mainstream media's overinflated sense of importance and self-worth -- especially the political media based in Washington D.C.

Now, facing the stark possibility of a second Trump term in the White House, some mainstream media executives are panicking at the thought and proclaiming their long-established profession to be essentially dead, according to Fox News.

The rather revealing reasoning behind such proclamations is the idea that, if Trump wins again, it means the mainstream media has lost its ability to shape and control narratives or influence the political beliefs of around half of the country.

"A Trump victory means mainstream media is dead in its current form"

New York Magazine's Intelligencer reported this week on the growing concerns among mainstream media executives and reporters that, unlike during his first term in office, there won't be another "Trump bump" of increased ratings and subscriptions for news outlets that aggressively cover the former president.

Instead, they worry, a substantial number of the American people will tune the media out and figuratively bury their heads in the sand for the next four years, oblivious to their hyperventilating over the latest Trump-involved outrage du jour -- or, as they themselves see it, their grueling but righteous efforts to speak truth to power and defend democracy by holding a would-be fascist authoritarian accountable with hard-hitting investigative reporting.

A big part of that fear is the growing realization for some in the media that a sizeable chunk of the population, certainly those who continue to support Trump despite the incessant barrage of negative media reports about him, no longer believe or are influenced by the media's narratives about the Republican nominee.

As one unnamed TV media executive told the outlet, "If half the country has decided that Trump is qualified to be president, that means they’re not reading any of this media, and we’ve lost this audience completely. A Trump victory means mainstream media is dead in its current form. And the question is what does it look like after."

The slowly dawning realizations of some in the media

To be sure, while some in the media have begun to realize that they "lost" their audience of Trump supporters, most still fail to grasp why that has occurred and have utterly failed to reflect upon the prominent role they played in creating the current reality they now lament.

That was evidenced by some of the other anonymous media executives and reporters quoted in the Intelligencer article, as they spoke of the need to redouble their efforts to investigate and critically report on every move made by Trump but worried that journalists and the public were too fatigued from the first go-round to effectively cover or pay sufficient attention to their warnings a second time.

There are some in the media who at least partially understand what they and colleagues have wrought over the past several years, however, as one TV executive told the outlet, "The left-wing attempt to deplatform Trump after the 2020 election was the single biggest mistake because it forced him to create his own alternative-reality ecosystem, and it only accelerated our own irrelevance."

Indeed, thanks in part to the mainstream media's blatant dishonesty, overt partisanship, and constant overreactions to everything Trump says and does, a significant and growing number of alternative media sources, some clearly biased and others more independent, have increasingly established themselves as a counterweight to the mainstream media's narratives and undermined their legacy as influencers of societal thought.

"It’s going to change everything if he wins. You’ve got the major disruptions underpinning everything -- strategically, platform-wise, consumer technology -- no matter what happens in the election," another unnamed TV executive surmised. "And then if Trump wins, all of a sudden you’ve got this other pressure on everything. There’s brand damage. He undermines trust in the media. It’s just going to add a level of complexity."

Non-endorsements of Harris sparked crisis for media outlets

The main impetus for the Intelligencer's worry-fest of anxious media executives and reporters was the controversy that erupted over the decisions by the billionaire owners of The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times to not endorse Vice President Kamala Harris, ostensibly because those owners realize most Americans no longer care about or are influenced by media endorsements and, in fact, are more prone to distrust and perceive those outlets as biased and partisan following such a declared political stance.

Those non-endorsement decisions prompted a surge of subscription cancelations for both the Post and the Times, according to Semafor, which suggests that the media is now damned if they do and damned if they don't, as they will continue to alienate Trump's supporters by going after the former president but risk also losing their devoted liberal base if they try to play things more neutral, as all good journalists should, going forward.