Don't Trust the Mainstream Media!
Monday, December 5, 2022
Wednesday, June 7, 2017
Friday, November 11, 2016
News Media Yet Again Misreads America’s Complex Pulse
All the dazzling technology, the big data and the sophisticated modeling that American newsrooms bring to the fundamentally human endeavor of presidential politics could not save American journalism from yet again being behind the story, behind the rest of the country.
The news media by and large missed what was happening all around it, and it was the story of a lifetime. The numbers weren’t just a poor guide for election night–they were an off-ramp away from what was actually happening.
No one predicted a night like this–that Donald J. Trump would pull off a stunning upset over Hillary Clinton and win the presidency.
The misfire on Tuesday night was about a lot more than a failure in polling. It was a failure to capture the boiling anger of a large portion of the American electorate that feels left behind by a selective recovery, betrayed by trade deals that they see as threats to their jobs and disrespected by establishment Washington, Wall Street and the mainstream media.
Journalists didn’t question the polling data when it confirmed their gut feeling that Mr. Trump could never in a million years pull it off. They portrayed Trump supporters who still believed he had a shot as being out of touch with reality. In the end, it was the other way around.
It was just a few months ago that so much of the European media failed to foresee the vote in Britain to leave the European Union. Election 2016, thy name is Brexit.
Election Day had been preceded by more than a month of declarations that the race was close but essentially over. And that assessment held even after the late-October news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was reviewing a new batch of emails related to Mrs. Clinton’s private server.
Mrs. Clinton’s victory would be “substantial but not overwhelming,” The Huffington Post had reported, after assuring its readers that “she’s got this.” That more or less comported with The New York Times’s Upshot projection early Tuesday evening that Mrs. Clinton was an 84 percent favorite to win the presidency.
Then came a profound shift, as mainstream media organizations scrambled to catch the bus that had just run them over. By 10:30 p.m., the Upshot projection had switched around, remarkably, to 93 percent in favor of Mr. Trump.
Other major sites also flipped from a likely Clinton victory to a likely Trump victory. John King of CNN proclaimed to his huge election night audience that during the previous couple of weeks, “We were not having a reality-based conversation” given the map he had before him, showing Mr. Trump with a clear opportunity to reach the White House.
That was an extraordinary admission; if the news media failed to present a reality-based political scenario, then it failed in performing its most fundamental function.
“I think the polling was a mess,” Stanley Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, told me Tuesday night. “But I think a lot of it was interpretation of the polls.”
Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist, said on MSNBC, “My crystal ball has been shattered into atoms” because he predicted the opposite outcome. “Tonight data died,” he added.
Regardless of the outcome, it was clear that the polls, and the projections, had underestimated the strength of Mr. Trump’s vote, and the movement he built, which has defied all predictions and expectations since he announced his candidacy last year.
Politics is not just about numbers; data can’t always capture the human condition that is the blood of American politics. And it is not the sole function of political reporting to tell you who will win or who will lose. But that question–the horse race–has too often shadowed everything else, and inevitably colors other reporting, too.
What’s amazing is how many times the news media has missed the populist movements that have been rocking national politics since at least 2008. It failed to initially see the rise of the Tea Party, which led to the Republican wave of elections of 2010 and 2014, which was supposed to be the year the so-called Republican establishment regained control over its intraparty insurgency.
Then, of course, there was Mr. Trump’s own unexpected rise to the nomination. And after each failure came a vow to learn lessons, and not ever allow it to happen again. And yet the lessons did not come fast enough to get it right when it most mattered.
Whatever the election result, you’re going to hear a lot from news executives about how they need to send their reporters out into the heart of the country, to better understand its citizenry.
But that will miss something fundamental. Flyover country isn’t a place, it’s a state of mind–it’s in parts of Long Island and Queens, much of Staten Island, certain neighborhoods of Miami or even Chicago. And, yes, it largely–but hardly exclusively–pertains to working-class white people.
They think something is so wrong that all the fact-checking of Mr. Trump this year, the countless reports of his lies–which he uttered more than Mrs. Clinton did–and the vigorous investigation of his business and personal transgressions, bothered them far less than the perceived national ills Mr. Trump was pointing to and promising to fix.
In their view the government was broken, the economic system was broken, and, we heard so often, the news media was broken, too.
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
The Media Doesn't Get Religion
By John Stonestreet, Christian Post, March 1, 2013
Describing the Pope’s last public mass, Anthony Faiola of the Washington Post wrote about young seminarians taking notes with tears in their eyes and tour groups straining their necks to catch a glimpse from the rear of the church.
Then he got around to describing Benedict’s procession. As Faiola told Post readers, “He walked with a gilded cane in the shape of a cross” as people cheered “Long live the Pope!”
The “gilded cane in the shape of a cross” he’s referring to was actually a crosier, the shepherd’s staff that symbolizes a bishop’s role as the leader of his flock.
The Post isn’t alone in its apparent ignorance of this most ancient of Christian regalia. Eight years ago, the New York Times, referring to the same object, called it a “crow’s ear,” which given the anatomical improbability of the phrase, should have caught an editor’s attention.
But it isn’t only Catholicism: Scarcely, a month goes by without some major news outlet referring to Evangelicals as “Evangelists.” Similarly, these outlets often use the word “evangelical” and “fundamentalist” interchangeably, and their work suggests that most of what they know about us is limited to what they have gleaned from the world of politics.
As Terry Mattingly documents regularly over at “Get Religion,” the media doesn’t “get religion.”
And given the centrality of religion to so many people’s lives, this ignorance and tone-deafness is bizarre. Imagine a sportswriter repeatedly referring to the “last two innings of the Super Bowl.” You would rightly question his competence and go elsewhere for your sports news.
Yet something very much like this kind of ignorance pervades mainstream coverage of religion. Please note: I’m not talking about bias, of which there’s plenty. I mean people writing about a subject they just don’t understand.
Yet people who don’t know a crosier from a crow’s ear pontificate (pun intended) on whom the next pope should be and what the Catholic church “must” do to become relevant.
And people for whom Joshua, Judges and Ruth is, at most, an album by Lyle Lovett, report on people for whom the Bible is the guide to life.
I say this in sorrow much more than anger. It’s a painful reminder that we’re really living in a post-Christian culture.
Chuck Colson loved to tell the story about the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk in World War II. As the British people awaited news of their fate, they received a three-word message: “And if not.”
As Chuck said, “It was a reference to the words of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego standing before King Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace. ‘Our God is able to save us … and if not, we will remain faithful to him anyway.’”
The British people understood the message, and organized what is considered a miraculous evacuation.
It’s difficult, if not impossible, to imagine something like that happening today. Neither the media nor, to be fair, much of the audience, would get the reference.
To call ours a “post-Christian” culture isn’t so much a statement about individual people’s beliefs as it is a description of the role Christianity plays in shaping the imagination of our culture. For much of our history, Christianity played a central role in this shaping. Non-believers made and understood biblical allusions.
Now, even the most basic references go right over our heads. Everyone is a fundamentalist and popes carry birds’ ears. We just don’t get it anymore.
And we should note that sometimes we are guilty as Christians of the same ignorance. It’s not uncommon to hear Baptists misrepresent Pentecostals, or Calvinists caricature Arminians and vice versa. Or Protestants and Catholics repeat falsehoods about each other.
