National news media outlets
That would be unfortunate, given the spectacular scale of this year’s failure and its transformative implications for the future. Prime among these is the problem of how to effectively marshal truth to combat pervasive lying in what increasingly appears to be a postfactual society. Much good reporting was published in print and online this year about Donald Trump’s problematic business and charitable dealings and his personal misconduct, all of which was apparently ignored by millions of voters or else overwhelmed by fake news posted on social media such as Facebook and on Google. Old-line news media have been slow to recognize the power of such sites to alter the very nature of people’s relationship with verifiable fact. They constitute, in fact, a vast network on which to manufacture, nurse and amplify grievance, much of it fueled by the very falsehoods in which they traffic. Better and more tech-savvy minds than ours will be required to address this situation, although one hopes that the actuality of a Trump presidency will be enough to discourage reliance on such sources of disinformation.
There are other ways, however, in which this media failure can be viewed. Since the election, much has been made of the fact that so-called “data-driven” predictive models maintained by, among others, The New York Times and The Huffington Post, not only failed to anticipate a possible Trump victory but also confidently concluded that Hillary Clinton was highly likely to win. The response to criticism so far includes: that the public does not understand probability; that state polling data was unreliable; and that media outlets failed to provide the context in which the information presented in their slick online graphics should be evaluated.
All that may be true, but it obscures a central truth: Journalists are neither soothsayers nor handicappers, and the obsession with forecasting winners detracts from journalism’s essential function, which is to inform and elucidate. Data certainly has a role to play in performing that job, but number-crunching is not an end in itself.
Another central shortcoming in this year’s coverage was the inability of journalists to fully comprehend and appreciate the forces that were shaping the electorate and the election, and which fueled the rise of Bernie Sanders as well as Donald Trump. One way to understand how this came about is to note, as many have, that the national media are concentrated in a very few large cities on the two coasts, a long way away from the central action this year in what has been called “flyover” country.
Flyover country, of course, is not confined to the Rust Belt, the South and rural America, but rather is a place currently defined by economic distress, religious devotion and anger that its plight has been ignored. In short, as New York Times columnist Jim Rutenberg perceptively pointed out in an election post-mortem, it is a state of mind that is a foreign country to many reporters for major publications and networks, who unconsciously share many of the unspoken assumptions of the economic and social elite among whom they work and dwell.
The professionalization of journalism over the past 40 years has had many benefits. A generation of reporters with college and advanced degrees and specialized knowledge are able to report incisively and in depth on complicated matters. They are also, by and large, better writers and more ethical practitioners than their predecessors, and they are compensated accordingly at big news outlets. What may have been lost are street smarts and a highly sensitive antenna for registering the public mood. The mental landscape of the newsroom has shrunk, and along with it the ability of journalists to relate to — even to put themselves in the shoes of — people who are very different from themselves. Solving this will require not only dispatching reporters to far-flung hamlets across the country, but reorienting journalistic enterprise in the direction of the open mind as well as the open notebook.