If you’re like me, you haven’t turned on the news since last Tuesday when Donald Trump won the election. Personally, I can’t bear to listen to another minute of wisdom from Joy Reid, my friend Lawrence O’Donnell or the admirable Rachel Maddow. I can’t hear Anderson Cooper, or Abby Phillip. Can’t abide getting the lowdown on NPR or from the New York Times’ Daily Michael Barbaro. Or “The View” ladies.
I can’t do it.
I’m not saying I’ll never watch or listen again. But – am I alone here? – my entire body recoils from listening to more claptrap from the same claptrapping apparatus.
The media got it wrong. Fatally wrong. And the media can’t just pivot into the next cycle of looking around the room and asking, “What just happened?” as if it had nothing to do with it. The room is too small. The audience insular. The results were decisively not what was expected. And in some way, the media has forfeited its mandate as a result. I speak as a member of the media and also someone who critiques the media and who believes that the First Amendment – the free exchange of information and opinion – is the indispensable pillar of democracy.
But we have to step back and look at the wreckage. Our system of information failed for a second time on two major fronts: The media failed to gauge the actual mood of the American electorate, wishcasting the competent, non-felonious Kamala Harris into office. And it failed to speak persuasively to voters who rejected the collective wisdom of legacy media, after being told who Trump is, what bad acts he has already committed and what further bad acts he has promised if reelected.
None of it landed, it appears. Apparently we are talking to ourselves.
People, the system needs a total rethink.
Some of my colleagues have sadly chosen to blame the voters. “We have romanticized the working class and minorities,” wrote a journalist friend who has been in the trenches for three decades, like me. “These are not these innocent lambs who were deceived. Many are racist and misogynist.”
Or blame the Democrats. New York Times columnists Lydia Polgreen invested a couple of thousand words in conversation with Tressie McMillan Cottom to get to the bottom of what happened. The conversation doubled down on the progressive left’s agenda, despite voters’ thunderous rejection.
“It is still astonishing to me that the Harris campaign invested so much in touting support of Republicans who had clearly failed to persuade their own allies to join their side. Who did they expect would suddenly be persuaded by them?” Polgreen said under a headline about the Democrats: “They Were Wrong.”
As a response, that is not going to work. Polgreen should be asking: Why weren’t those on the Republican side persuaded? Who were they listening to?
“The answer is the right-wing media,” wrote The New Republic’s Michael Tomasky. “Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.”
True. So what do the rest of us do? I’m not yet seeing the self-examination that is warranted. We need a collective brainstorm and a serious response as a profession. We have lost the room. Never in my life did I think that the scarcity of information that existed before the rise of mass media might be less risky for our democracy than an oversupply of information. Nor was I imaginative enough to think that a focused stream of misinformation would present a serious challenge to real reporting and news.
If people have moved away from network news and broadsheet newspapers to opinionated podcasts and TikTok lies, then that’s one signal of how things need to change. If more people are watching “television” on YouTube than on any given broadcast or cable network, then OK – the table stakes have changed.
I have been reluctant to give up on my bedrock belief that reporters should aim to report facts rather than tell readers how to think. More and more it seems that we are telling people what and how to think. In the last two weeks before the election, MSNBC’s primetime was running Harris and Obama’s rallies nearly end to end. To no end.
But I do not have the answer for how media and information needs to be reapproached. Here at TheWrap we have pivoted into serving news over our social media accounts in addition to the mothership website, because we know that’s where new readers are.
Right now there are far more questions than answers. But blaming the voters is lazy and doesn’t address the problem. Our job is to hold power to account. Time to hold ourselves to account.
