Media's Role In Election
November 12, 2016 at 5:41 a.m.
By Gary [email protected]
Certainly surprised me.
I predicted a Hillary Clinton win with her receiving 302 electoral votes and a five-point popular vote margin.
I guess I just followed the rest of the sheeple who believed what the polls and the pundits were telling us.
Problem is, the polls and the pundits were dead wrong.
And the result was stunning.
Who could have imagined that Trump would win Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin? This wasn’t even close. This was an electoral blowout.
Hillary won the popular vote by a percentage point, but Trump wound up with 306 electoral votes, 36 more than the 270 he needed to claim the White House.
I had an inkling that something like this could happen, but I was turned away from thoughts like those by the overwhelming consensus among pollsters and media elites.
I also thought that perhaps there was this under-the-radar group of Trump voters who wouldn’t admit to pollsters who they were supporting.
I knew those voters existed, but I never dreamed there were enough of them to put Trump over the top.
And there were other things – given the narrative set up for us by the media – that just made absolutely no sense.
Trump actually did better with blacks and Hispanics than Mitt Romney did in 2012. And, stunningly, more white women voted for Trump than Clinton.
Who could have predicted those eventualities?
But I can tell you this: This election has been an epiphany for me in one regard.
I’ve always thought the media carried a liberal bias, and there’s been plenty of anecdotal evidence to support that conclusion over the years.
But this election? The bias was palpable. “News” outlets all but campaigned for Hillary.
And WikiLeaks confirmed something many have suspected for a long time – a shocking level of bald-faced collusion between media types and the Clinton campaign.
Didn’t the media tell us repeatedly that Trump was a racist, a misogynist and a xenophobe?
There’s no way a woman, a black person or an Hispanic person would vote for Trump, we were told.
But they did, didn’t they?
“The first woman president” was the historic narrative they were pushing and they did all they could to make it happen.
That’s why we were told time and again that Hillary was the favorite to win. That’s why pollsters – with the exception of those employed by the L.A. Times and Investors Business Daily – told us over and over that Hillary was in the lead.
They tried to set up a self-fulfilling prophecy for Hillary.
When you’re in the business of tilting things a certain way, you discount, ignore or omit things that don’t fit the narrative.
I believe that’s what happened here. If there was any evidence of cracks in Hillary’s electoral firewall, they were ignored.
If there were any anomalies in polling data, they were discarded. Polling samples were weighted.
Gotta keep pushing the narrative right up to election day.
It was so instructional to watch the wailing and gnashing of teeth among the media elites as the results came in.
Their faces were ashen. Their stares were blank. Many, having jettisoned any semblance of objectivity long ago, actually lashed out.
“How could the voters do this to us?” they lamented.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was blinking like she got pepper sprayed after announcing that Trump would win Ohio and North Carolina.
After a break, she stared straight into the camera and offered this to her viewers:
“You're awake by the way. You're not having a terrible, terrible dream. Also, you're not dead and you haven't gone to hell. This is your life now. This is our election now. This is us. This is our country. It’s real.”
Yeah, it’s real all right.
And you know what else is real? How far out of step the media elites are with average Americans.
As people like Maddow were telling all of America how awful Trump and his supporters – and Republicans in general – were, there were millions of them trudging to the polls.
And the electoral map turned red. And not just for Trump. For senators, congressmen, governors, attorneys general and state legislators.
Didn’t the media tell us that the Democrats would win a majority in the Senate because of Trump’s drain on down-ballot races?
Yeah, they told us that.
But they got it wrong. They got it wrong because they ignored and failed to report anything that didn’t fit the narrative.
I’m more than a little disappointed in myself for not seeing through it.
And don’t expect it to get better anytime soon. Expect the media to trumpet any failures and downplay any successes in Trump’s adminstration. This, of course, is precisely the opposite of how the media treated Obama.
It didn’t take long to see evidence of this phenomenon.
On Wednesday morning, CNN was reporting how “markets were crashing” because of Trump’s election. It was certainly worth noting that market futures were down by 4 percent. But by the time the market opened, futures had rebounded by 2 percent.
Not long after the market opened, initial declines were erased. By they end of the trading session, the Dow had rallied to a record high.
CNN declined to report the rally. They told viewers about the “crash,” but when things turned around, it was no longer newsworthy.
Why am I not surprised?
Certainly surprised me.
I predicted a Hillary Clinton win with her receiving 302 electoral votes and a five-point popular vote margin.
I guess I just followed the rest of the sheeple who believed what the polls and the pundits were telling us.
Problem is, the polls and the pundits were dead wrong.
And the result was stunning.
Who could have imagined that Trump would win Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin? This wasn’t even close. This was an electoral blowout.
Hillary won the popular vote by a percentage point, but Trump wound up with 306 electoral votes, 36 more than the 270 he needed to claim the White House.
I had an inkling that something like this could happen, but I was turned away from thoughts like those by the overwhelming consensus among pollsters and media elites.
I also thought that perhaps there was this under-the-radar group of Trump voters who wouldn’t admit to pollsters who they were supporting.
I knew those voters existed, but I never dreamed there were enough of them to put Trump over the top.
And there were other things – given the narrative set up for us by the media – that just made absolutely no sense.
Trump actually did better with blacks and Hispanics than Mitt Romney did in 2012. And, stunningly, more white women voted for Trump than Clinton.
Who could have predicted those eventualities?
But I can tell you this: This election has been an epiphany for me in one regard.
I’ve always thought the media carried a liberal bias, and there’s been plenty of anecdotal evidence to support that conclusion over the years.
But this election? The bias was palpable. “News” outlets all but campaigned for Hillary.
And WikiLeaks confirmed something many have suspected for a long time – a shocking level of bald-faced collusion between media types and the Clinton campaign.
Didn’t the media tell us repeatedly that Trump was a racist, a misogynist and a xenophobe?
There’s no way a woman, a black person or an Hispanic person would vote for Trump, we were told.
But they did, didn’t they?
“The first woman president” was the historic narrative they were pushing and they did all they could to make it happen.
That’s why we were told time and again that Hillary was the favorite to win. That’s why pollsters – with the exception of those employed by the L.A. Times and Investors Business Daily – told us over and over that Hillary was in the lead.
They tried to set up a self-fulfilling prophecy for Hillary.
When you’re in the business of tilting things a certain way, you discount, ignore or omit things that don’t fit the narrative.
I believe that’s what happened here. If there was any evidence of cracks in Hillary’s electoral firewall, they were ignored.
If there were any anomalies in polling data, they were discarded. Polling samples were weighted.
Gotta keep pushing the narrative right up to election day.
It was so instructional to watch the wailing and gnashing of teeth among the media elites as the results came in.
Their faces were ashen. Their stares were blank. Many, having jettisoned any semblance of objectivity long ago, actually lashed out.
“How could the voters do this to us?” they lamented.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was blinking like she got pepper sprayed after announcing that Trump would win Ohio and North Carolina.
After a break, she stared straight into the camera and offered this to her viewers:
“You're awake by the way. You're not having a terrible, terrible dream. Also, you're not dead and you haven't gone to hell. This is your life now. This is our election now. This is us. This is our country. It’s real.”
Yeah, it’s real all right.
And you know what else is real? How far out of step the media elites are with average Americans.
As people like Maddow were telling all of America how awful Trump and his supporters – and Republicans in general – were, there were millions of them trudging to the polls.
And the electoral map turned red. And not just for Trump. For senators, congressmen, governors, attorneys general and state legislators.
Didn’t the media tell us that the Democrats would win a majority in the Senate because of Trump’s drain on down-ballot races?
Yeah, they told us that.
But they got it wrong. They got it wrong because they ignored and failed to report anything that didn’t fit the narrative.
I’m more than a little disappointed in myself for not seeing through it.
And don’t expect it to get better anytime soon. Expect the media to trumpet any failures and downplay any successes in Trump’s adminstration. This, of course, is precisely the opposite of how the media treated Obama.
It didn’t take long to see evidence of this phenomenon.
On Wednesday morning, CNN was reporting how “markets were crashing” because of Trump’s election. It was certainly worth noting that market futures were down by 4 percent. But by the time the market opened, futures had rebounded by 2 percent.
Not long after the market opened, initial declines were erased. By they end of the trading session, the Dow had rallied to a record high.
CNN declined to report the rally. They told viewers about the “crash,” but when things turned around, it was no longer newsworthy.
Why am I not surprised?
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