How the news media helped Trump to win

photo illustration by gerd altmann

Let’s acknowledge immediately that broader forces than the news media brought about the result of the presidential election. But the victory of a candidate whose demerits were repeatedly spotlighted by responsible news organizations demands retrospection.

So I asked some smart people to assess the campaign coverage by the mainstream media –national print/online outlets and the major TV/cable networks – and to be any combination of complimentary or critical.

Pretty much, it was the latter. And fundamental concerns, too. Donald Trump didn’t win because The New York Times wrote too many euphemistic headlines. It goes deeper than that. 

Dr. Cynthia Peacock, co-director of the Office of Politics, Communication and Media (OPCaM) at the University of Alabama, wrote in an email that the seeming benefit of having more sources of news than ever before – from news media and social media – actually is “fertile ground for highly partisan and misleading information.” That has the unfortunate consequence that different segments of the public make decisions based on different sets of facts, which “sets us up to fail” at the basic requirement of democracy to talk to each other. 

“When Democrats who prefer MSNBC and Republicans who faithfully tune in to Fox News come together, they might as well be speaking different languages,” she said. “The news they consume has presented them not only with different issues but completely different ‘facts’ regarding those issues. No wonder we can’t fathom how the other side could make the decisions they do – we’re living with differing ideas about the nature of reality.”

(I will add my view that this problem is not equally balanced. The partisan outlets on the political right are far more guilty of going beyond presentation of selective, favorable facts to the promotion of falsehoods.)

My department colleague Dr. A.J. Bauer, another OPCaM researcher, believes the news media have become too focused on misinformation and disinformation (false information spread to intentionally deceive). “The commitments to fact checking, to publicizing and exposing lies and false statements, only further circulated those ideas — creating the epistemological (knowledge) crisis it aimed to solve,” he wrote in an email. 

That emphasis, he said, appeals to the “journalistic ego” and reinforces a norm of objectivity that “has always been flawed.” 

“Its presumption that Trump supporters are dupes or operating in an alternative reality has only made it more difficult to understand the Republican Party’s ongoing salience. Right-wing folks didn’t share AI images of Trump wading in hurricane flood waters last month because they were tricked into believing they were real. They did it because they felt those images reflected a deeper truth. They voted based on that truth, while reporters played pedantry.” 

 What’s necessary, he concluded, is for journalists and researchers to pay less attention to disinformation and more attention to “why (Trump supporters) believe what they do.” 

Dr. M. Clay Carey, a professor in the Department of Communication and Media at Samford University, sees “frequent disconnects between people who practice journalism and those who consume or avoid the news.” Citing an article published Wednesday by the Nieman Lab journalism website, he noted that journalists believe readers want media independence and traditional news values. Meanwhile, readers say they actually want the press to offer “empathy and a genuine desire to listen and understand” them. The result of this divide is “distrust and cynicism,” he wrote.

He offered actionable advice for newsrooms. “Journalistic habits of focusing on political extremes and poll-based coverage centered on winners and losers might give way to reporting centered on the challenges our communities face and how government might tackle those challenges. People in those communities might become more important parts of those conversations. Too often, they are shouldered out by pundits, pollsters, and political operatives.” 

Clearly, the news media have some rethinking to do about how they can become more trusted and influential (although I’m sure Fox has no interest in that). I scoffed, however, at the Republicans on social media who declared that Trump’s win had rendered the mainstream press irrelevant. Journalism that is respected plays a vital role in better civics. With democracy under threat, the mainstream press has never been more relevant. That’s why – pronto – it needs to figure out what to do differently.