The unbearable smugness of the press

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/commentary-the-unbearable-smugness-of-the-press-presidential-election-2016/

by andrenth • 10 years ago

163 254 10 years ago

As a European, this article on cracked.com (yes, cracked.com) gave me a lot of insight into why / how Trump won.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-on...

It's Brexit all over again. Will the politicians in my country (NL) learn to listen to 'the other half', before their campaigns start (next spring)? Probably not.

helthanatos2• 10 years ago

Trump won because people are sick of SJWs. He won because people are sick of being called racists when they're not. He won because his opponent was objectively worse. Any other democrat running against him would have probably led to different results, but the bickering between the children turned out in Trump's favor. It's ridiculous that either one ran. All we can do now is hope Trump does well. It really wouldn't be that hard to do "well"; we haven't had a good president for quite many years.

mariodiana• 10 years ago

It's overall a very good opinion piece, but this little ditty didn't escape my notice:

We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession.

"Medical problems"? I don't know much about these things, but isn't this what some would call a "microagression"?

Eh, I'm going to give the guy a pass. At least he's trying.

spiderfarmer2• 10 years ago

According to the article, there is more to it than just hating sucial justice warriors. The fact that rural infrastructure is crumbling, jobs are lost and not returning and the fact that during 8 years with a democrat at the helm didn't change much for them. It is enough for a lot of people to seriously consider the alternative, especially if the (untrusted) establishment hates this alternative.

M_Grey• 10 years ago

And here I thought Trump won because of record low voter turnouts.

Everyone has a theory.

acqq3• 10 years ago

his opponent was objectively worse

If he really continues with global warming denial and make real effects based on that idea, I'd like to see who will dare to say that to his kids. Just this single issue is enough to make the whole difference.

https://thinkprogress.org/trump-victory-climate-a0c595572299

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees:_Our_Future_on_a_H...

That's also the biggest issue that's still not clear in the confused heads of too much US citizens, and where the real action is needed.

Misinformation paid by the oil companies sadly worked. The good proof than even the side that sees other manipulations isn't immune at all.

As one thinker said: "when you look at somebody and hold your head and think how come the other side just doesn't see the facts, there's a simple answer: you're an idiot, and, by the way, the other side is too. People aren't rational. The proof: almost 50-50 opinions, even among the supposedly "smart" people, on some important subject -- how probable is that to be the reflection of the real rational state of the truthfulness of the issue in question. Effectively zero."

pjc50• 10 years ago

objectively worse

On what objective metric(s)? Answering this properly is extremely hard.

GunboatDiplomat2• 10 years ago

That's part of it, but I wouldn't put it at more than 20-30% of the total explanation.

nommm-nommm3• 10 years ago

Ummm that article doesn't seem to notice the whole shit ton of blue in the rural northeast. Like the entirety of Vermont and the Berkshires in Massachusetts. The most populous part of Connecticut appear to be the red parts of Connecticut (looks like Bridgeport?). It's hard to tell but the red parts of New Hampshire seem to be around Portsmouth? Which isn't exactly a city in the traditional sense of the word but certainly nowhere near rural. As an aside Portsmouth drivers are seriously the most polite drivers I've ever encountered. The red part of new York is Buffalo which is the second most populous city in new York state! EDIT: now that I look closer it appears Rochester and Buffalo seem to be tiny little blue dots surrounded by red.

Does this person think the entire Northeast is a giant city?

douche3• 10 years ago

I don't think you can discount the populations of elderly Democratic voters in these New England rural areas. People that have been voting Democrat since Kennedy or longer.

Maine tilted pretty hard, with the rural 2nd District going convincingly for Trump. However, LePage also gets a lot of support and approval from those same regions, even now, with everything he's said and done, so we may just like blowhards.

shaftoe2• 10 years ago

That article struck a chord with me. I live in a city, but I am not of a city.

The no-car, 600-square-foot-apartment, minimalist, trendy-restaurant, latest-social-justice-fashion people that surround me feel like a gang of condescending children. They wave policies with reaching consequences like foam fingers at a sports game. They are mugged and then bend themselves into a pretzel to avoid describing the attacker as black and explain the crime as a symptom of economic injustice. They pretend like Hillary doesn't have 20 years of corrupt history and an attitude that approximates the worst of European nobility.

I don't like Trump, but sometimes a giant orange middle finger is needed to break out of a rut.

nommm-nommm3• 10 years ago

Does this actually happen? It sounds like a total caricature of what someone thinks city folk are like. I mean, I spent the majority of my life in cities of different sizes and also have friends across the entire Northeast and I travel a lot. Nothing like this actually happens. My extended family are casual racists and complain a lot about Puerto Ricans. Hillary was widely unpopular with everyone I know, liberal, conservative, and moderate. I don't know a single minimalist but know a lot of people who complain they are poor while buying a bunch of junk. When my house was broken into by unknown assailants a friend of mine said "It must be niggers." Nobody really goes around talking about political policies very much, it's almost never a topic of conversation. We are generally just a bunch of normal people and none of us actually do that stuff. We have different culture and mostly different activities than rural Americans but we are not at all like you describe.

We do go to restaurants, coffee shops and bars a lot but never because it's trendy. Actually now that I think of it that wasn't big in one of the cities I lived in.

They are mugged and then bend themselves into a pretzel to avoid describing the attacker as black

This is absurd and nobody is bending anything. People i know who got mugged said "I got mugged." I do admit i never heard "I got mugged by a black man" but probably because that information isn't entirely relevant but no bending like a pretzel. Unless you believe bending like a pretzel means "not bitching endlessly about an entire race because of the actions of on person."

JamisonM6• 10 years ago

I don't like Trump, but sometimes a giant orange middle finger is needed to break out of a rut.

These are generally the sentiments that are comforting but do not actually make any practical sense. Policies matter, decisions that will make things worse now will in fact make things worse now.

The only people with the luxury of being able to think "it needs to get worse before it can get better" or some approximation of that are people with enough economic and social security to be unlikely to be harmed by the "getting worse". To me that is real smugness.

chimprich• 10 years ago

The no-car, 600-square-foot-apartment, minimalist, trendy-restaurant, latest-social-justice-fashion people that surround me feel like a gang of condescending children.

Your complaint is about people who you feel are condescending, yet you are describing them as children?

EDIT: Since I've already been downvoted, perhaps I need to say that I'm pointing out the inherent contradiction in this statement.

CoolGuySteve3• 10 years ago

In a way, rural America was a tech bubble. In the 19th century and earlier, factories were in the city or near water. As the interstate system made shipping cheaper, factories moved out of the cities and coastlines for cheaper land and labor.

Now container shipping has moved factories into cheaper countries altogether. But we have generations of people that have lived in these rural factory towns which now have no factory.

The issue is real and Donald Trump was the only one addressing it. It's just too bad Donald Trump was the only one addressing it.

strange_quark• 10 years ago

But Trump didn't actually address it. He acknowledged the problem but didn't provide any tangible solution other than "I'm going to bring your jobs back" which is never going to happen. As you said, rural manufacturing was a buble.

cableshaft2• 10 years ago

Well, he made empty promises for votes. I don't see any way he could realistically bring those jobs back, even with raising tariffs.

I mean, if all it takes is having someone tell them "I'm a Democrat, and we're going to bring your jobs back, promise!", then liberals should start sending some random guy to all these places and saying that at town meetings and local public access channels on a weekly basis to prime and placate them early for the next election.

enobrev• 10 years ago

I appreciated that article, though I hated the headline and the format. I shared it a couple times and had to make apologies for both in order to ensure people would actually read it. The cracked format better serves pop-culture rants.

I found this article similarly enlightening, and a far better read.

https://www.propublica.org/article/revenge-of-the-forgotten-...

jasode2• 10 years ago

As a non-Trump supporter who's frightened that a loose cannon like him can have his finger on the big red nuclear button, I'm disappointed but not surprised that the mainstream media was smug.

Here's an example MSNBC video clip showing what the article is talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zL-ip6GH4c

At the 23 second mark in the video, you can see Brian Williams' body language struggling to contain his condescension for Mark Halperin's interpretation of the poll statistics that could point to a Trump victory. Mark wasn't saying Trump will win or even has a good chance of winning. Mark was just saying there's a possible path to winning. Even discussing what's mathematically possible with plenty of hedging, disclaimers, caveats, and uncertainty -- is ridiculed by the mainstream press. Everyone who thinks like Brian was caught up in the same delusion. If they dismiss one of their own professional peers with a minority perspective, it shouldn't be a surprise they treat rural Americans with condescension. (It turned out that Mark was correct in that Trump's late surge would affect the battleground states and that Clinton would misjudge the continued support of previous Obama voters.)

Looking back, a journalist could have assessed Mark's interpretation of the data in 2 ways:

#1) the poll data is a priori correct (there is no hidden Trump vote missed by pollsters) and therefore Mark sees something in the data because he's sympathetic to Trump

#2) Mark is open to the possibility of Trump winning and therefore can see something in the poll data and make (hedged) conclusions about it that all Trump opponents are blind to

It may seem like positions #1 and #2 are just rearranging the words but they are stating opposite cause & effect. They have profound differences in reality. Brian and the rest of msm interpreted any favorable Trump conclusions about the data as situation #1.

It's the same situation with taking Trump's chances seriously when he's characterized as "a clown" or "he insults women":

#1) Trump can't win because he insults women.

#2) Trump can win regardless of whether he insults women.

The mainstream media and elites focused on #1. The election results proved the actual voters standing in line to choose Trump saw the reality as #2.

cmdrfred2• 10 years ago

I think against Elizabeth Warren for example the anti-women sentiment would of had a greater effect on the outcome. Hillary Clinton's comments about Monica Lewinsky while first lady and her defence of Bill's actions makes this a bit of a pot kettle black situation. Somebody like Bernie can take the moral high ground on sexism and racism in a way that Hillary's record prevents her from doing so.

jasode2• 10 years ago

I think against Elizabeth Warren for example the anti-women sentiment would of had a greater effect on the outcome.

Sounds plausible but it's very hard to tell with a black swan candidate like Donald Trump. So many msm articles about Trump insulting blacks[1] and yet, he got more of the black vote than Romney in 2012[2]. It's another glaring example of the disconnect between what narrative the msm feeds us and what actually happened at the voting booths.

[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+insults+blacks

[2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/11/1...

pawn• 10 years ago

Hillary getting a child rapist out of serving a very long sentence in prison was a big one, in my own opinion. The fact that she had a taped interview where she laughed it off as no big deal and said she did it 'as a favor' made it indefensible to anyone except an apologist.

dingaling• 10 years ago

who's frightened that a loose cannon like him can have his finger on the big red nuclear button

I grew up during the Cold War and in Europe we were gobsmacked and terrified when a loudmouthed former actor was voted in as President on a ticket of opposing the SALT II agreement. Indeed he started funding SDI and emplaced GLCM and Pershing II in Europe and it looked like the US nuclear policy was heading towards survivable-first-strike. Survivable for the USA, that is.

But he went on to sign the INF Treaty and very nearly signed START II ( he would have done so if his advisers hadn't derailed him at the Moscow Summit ). He stood on the steps of the Kremlin and recanted his former accusations of 'evil empire' and he pulled us back from the nuclear brink.

You just never can predict...

lagadu6• 10 years ago

As a non-American, I completely agree. One of the things I found to be most egregious was how some people used "The KKK endorses Trump" as an argument as to why you shouldn't vote for him. If people only voted based on an organization's endorsement then that organization would have complete control over the election.

They just couldn't comprehend that people could or would vote despite the KKK's endorsement. And reading a lot of opinion articles on a few bigger media outlets (hi NYtimes!): instead of realizing that something may be flawed with their perception, you see them doubling down; saying that people are so racist/sexist/homophobic/<insert insult here> that they actually voted because of that. A massive election figuratively slapping them straight in the face wasn't enough to make so many people think about what they might be doing wrong. Obviously some did, like the linked article but it seems to be such a minority.

It's uncanny.

aphexairlines• 10 years ago

No mention of the lower turnout this year (even as the population continues to grow) or that most voters were actually #WithHer.

The media are suckers for the overton window, and this is calling for more of the same kid gloves that they used during the Bush/Cheney years. No, thanks.

helthanatos2• 10 years ago

That's not true at all

chestervonwinch• 10 years ago

Using [1], which is still incomplete, and [2], I calculate:

    Turnout (2016) = 49.43% = (60071781 + 59791135) / 242470820 * 100

Using [3], back to 1932 (for no particular reason), I calculate:

    Turnout (1932-2012) = 55.64(± 3.92)%

Obviously, caveats are that (1) the 2016 percentage will continue increase slightly, and (2) using turnouts back until 1932 was arbitrary choice.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/president

[2] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/00

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_St...

wtbob3• 10 years ago

most voters were actually #WithHer.

No, they weren't. According to the latest results, Mrs. Clinton received 48% of the popular vote: that means that most voters didn't vote for her.

More voted for her than for Mr. Trump, but neither earned a plurality of the popular vote.

nkohari• 10 years ago

Well.. you're parsing a bit, aren't you?

Clinton received the most votes, that is, the votes of most voters. The number of votes she received didn't represent a majority of the votes cast, but she still received the vote of most voters.

sk5t2• 10 years ago

neither earned a plurality

You mean a majority, no?

nitinreddy88• 10 years ago

As a outside US person, this article is pretty much nailed it. Clearly explained what's going wrong with US media

Melchizedek• 10 years ago

This might not make Americans feel better but other countries have it even worse. Swedish media has been surreal during this election. You would think the US just elected the literal devil as president.

The Bonnier papers (the single company that totally dominates Swedish media) ran a story about how to talk to your children about Trump, instructing parents to tone down the apocalyptic comments in order not to scare the kids too much.

return04• 10 years ago

Most EU media seemed to have parroted CNN throughout the campaign. In a way, the continental europeans were more shocked tham americans. And they continue to do so, e.g. yesterday's guardian was literally a list of lamentations.

lagadu6• 10 years ago

Not just Swedish, I imagine all European media too; it certainly looked like Danish and Portuguese (the two I follow closely) media thought that their audience was able to vote in the US elections, the way they were attacking Trump.

eeks• 10 years ago

French medias are a parangon of complacency, all of them.

msravi3• 10 years ago

I don't understand how thick headed the mainstream media (MSM) seems to be in not getting it. This "upset" win of Trump (upset in the sense that it didn't play by the MSM's wishes) was not an isolated incident - it's happened in India (2014), it happened in UK (Brexit), and it has been repeated in the US.

The fundamental driver for all three instances has been the removal of all filters on social media. The problem was that for too long the MSM used their power to filter content to its readers/viewers, and the filter was tuned by a group that wanted to script reality in a form that they wished to see come to fruition, even if their stand was hypocritical.

So for example, you'd see a huge hue and cry in the MSM about how freedom of expression was being harmed because a right wing outfit threatened someone for speaking out against a majority religion, and yet, when someone spoke out against Islam, and Islamic groups placed a bounty on his head, the same MSM would just go silent. It is this blatant hypocrisy that finally got them.

And now, with social media, for the first time people have access to unfiltered news and can form their own opinions. And for better or worse, the hypocrisy of the MSM is glaringly obvious for people who have access to multiple viewpoints on an incident - not just a filtered viewpoint. With the hypocrisy bare, it's basically been a revolt against the established media.

And unless the established media takes it upon themselves to be more honest in whatever stand they take, this is going to repeat, because, people aren't fools you know.

bryanlarsen• 10 years ago

"yet, when someone spoke out against Islam, and Islamic groups placed a bounty on his head, the same MSM would just go silent."

Salmon Rushdie, Charlie Hebdo and Jyllands–Posten all seem to be a cause célèbre of the liberal media even though the liberal media would otherwise despise Charlie Hebdo.

lagadu6• 10 years ago

That was only true until the refugee crisis gained momentum in the news cycles. You'll have troubling finding a peep defending the person and groups you listed in most international, big name media.

csydas• 10 years ago

I agree, with a "but", however.

It's not just that now there are more points of views to reference and understand, it's that now people do have the ability to reinforce their beliefs with articles and commentaries from virtually anywhere on the planet. While this has eroded what was an openly more liberal western media influence, it's what is seeping in through the cracks isn't exactly concrete journalism either.

Ease of access to information is a good thing, and I am in no way condemning or suggesting that the freedom of access to information we have is bad; but we also have a large public that isn't very well versed in how to do research for themselves. With mass media no longer serving as gatekeepers for information and everyone just finding sources for themselves, we're in the middle of what I'd consider a very arrogant age where we assume we are experts on virtually any subject because we can find information on it so quickly. We're ready to defend any position because, odds are, there's probably supporting evidence for it somewhere, if you just search long enough. And it happens regardless of political affiliation - outside of politics, you'll see such debates all the time on Facebook or forums with people constantly just posting citation lists at one another without actually taking the time to understand what the information they're citing actually means, if it's relevant, or processing it.

Mass media probably could stand to tone down the commentary and go back to facts - it would be nice, and we do occasionally get some really good pieces of journalism as a result of an editorial/opinion piece, but some more bare facts info would probably be better. But at the same time, people like the opinionated stuff, as long as the opinion is congruent with the viewer's own opinion. Not only that, but the opinion stuff sells; what was yelling at the TV screen is now screaming at the laptop screen while typing up a post furiously on Facebook.

But as a populous, we are complicit in it as well - the information available to us has made us very arrogant and very hard-headed/hard-hearted, since no matter what position we take, we know there's likely evidence enough to support it and to keep going without concession.

Yes, this year the media got caught with its pants down because they didn't appreciate the fact that they now have completely lost their position as gatekeepers. But it's not just media hypocrisy that is causing these changes, it's a world that more than ever is ready to fight and is armed with a whole new wave of information.

I don't know what major media's role is going to be in the years going forward - I do hope though that as people, we get past our arrogant stage of believing we know everything. The whole world is basically a bunch of college freshmen right now having just passed their first semester - we think we know all there is to know, and need to have the humility beat into us with the cudgel that is how much we don't know.

msravi3• 10 years ago

Mass media probably could stand to tone down the commentary and go back to facts - it would be nice, and we do occasionally get some really good pieces of journalism as a result of an editorial/opinion piece, but some more bare facts info would probably be better.

Actually, I really like that different newspapers have different opinions, and it's even better to see those opinions defended with passion and emotion. What riles me is that the newspapers are hypocritical and choose to mute their stand on an issue when it goes against another narrative that they've chosen to project. If you, as a newspaper, have taken a stand to say, bat for freedom of expression or women's rights or whatever, then go the whole way and be passionate about it. Just don't throw that under the bus and fail to call it out when another group who you think needs your voice for another cause is also guilty.

pg3144• 10 years ago

Yes, there are biases in e.g. the NYT and Washington Post. However, in terms of objectivity, they are miles ahead of the "unfiltered news" on social media. The written press try to check their sources, and hedge their statements if they are not certain. I admit that they do sometimes filter some stories that go against their beliefs/interests. However, they have things like op-eds that often contain different perspectives.

If you look at the "unfiltered news" on social media, most of it starts from a tidbit of information and then twists it to fit whatever narrative they are trying to promote. On top of that, in the social media bubble, you literally never get exposed to contrasting opinions. As an example, a week ago Wikileaks leaked a mail about 'spirit cooking', and tweeted a misleading message. That got picked up by 'news' stories on social media and turned into some satanic ritual. It even got mentions on Fox News. If you were trying to figure out what 'spirit cooking' really was, in the first days the first few pages of google were only links to dubious websites reinforcing that it was some satanic ritual (with authoritative sounding names like usapoliticstoday.com). Only later did you get links to sites debunking the story. I very much doubt that the average reader of these stories ever even went to Google to check the background story. You say people aren't fools. I would say people are easily fooled.

Add to this active disinformation campaigns (alt-right 'news' websites, twitter bots, troll farms), a constant drip of easily twisted Wikileak emails and an FBI director putting his whole weight on the scale during the last week of the election, and you get this disastrous election result.

msravi3• 10 years ago

I'll repeat what I said in response to another comment:

I think you're underestimating the intelligence of people. We like to think that we're much better than the average Joe at separating the wheat from the chaff, but the truth is that the average Joe just isn't so bad at it either - or at least, isn't much worse than an editor sitting in his echo chamber.

If I look at my twitter feed now, for example, I have a bunch of tweets criticizing a new decision of the government to withdraw high-denomination currencies (I'm from India), and for every such tweet there are others that are calling out the fallacies of the argument put forth. And vice versa.

Gives me all the viewpoints I need to form an opinion.

jerf• 10 years ago

"However, in terms of objectivity, they are miles ahead of the "unfiltered news" on social media."

There isn't actually a contradiction between the news media being miles ahead of "unfiltered news", and the fact that unfiltered news can show the biases of the media. In a social media age, if the filtered news can have its errors exposed easily, then trust will still decrease in it even if it is, hypothetically, 90% accurate.

Which is probably a great deal more accurate than it actually is, because the "filtered media" has been operating in a space where "nobody" (to a first approximation anyhow) could independently check it for decades and has gotten very used to its ability to filter things unopposed. We don't even have to hypothesize anything about hubris necessarily; it has simply been used to this being the reality in the same way that, say, the Federal government has become used to being the dominant governmental authority. It isn't necessarily "wrong", it just is. This position has left the media unable to deal with any sort of challenge to its authority... even the very confused, chaotic, challenge offered by current social media. They have never needed to develop an "immune system" to that sort of thing, though that's not a perfect metaphor.

It's hard to even judge how right the old media was, because you're measuring a yardstick against itself. How do you know the old media back in the 1990s was that good in the first place? Where are you getting the information you'd use to check that claim? How do you know that the filtered media didn't have things "start[] from a tidbit of information and then twists it to fit whatever narrative they are trying to promote"? It's not exactly hard to find instances of things that look like that in the past; to come up with a non-political example, "moral panics" are not a new phenomenon. D&D had a pretty good one off of a pretty small "tidbit".

A new media ecosystem will arise eventually. Probably some of the old media will manage to up their game enough to compete again. But it's never going to be monolithic again until social media is somehow entirely destroyed. And the social media is going to get better. Diversity is coming to the news industry whether it likes it or not.

Kurtz79• 10 years ago

Can't speak for the US, but the Brexit result in large part was driven by "traditional" media, in the form of tabloids that have a large circulation among the bulk of Brexit supporters and have long held nationalist and anti-EU positions.

dcposch2• 10 years ago

I don't understand how thick headed the mainstream media (MSM) seems to be in not getting it. This "upset" win of Trump (upset in the sense that it didn't play by the MSM's wishes) was not an isolated incident - it's happened in India (2014), it happened in UK (Brexit), and it has been repeated in the US.

Hubris. Hubris, to a hilarious degree.

Here's a story published 72 hours ago: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/election-day-things-look...

The first sentence says Hillary has a "98.2 percent chance of winning the presidency". It only gets better from there.

caseysoftware• 10 years ago

I bet against Hillary starting in May. I was nervous in October when the "grab them" audio came out but I stuck with it. Buffet's rule of going opposite the analysis that everyone knows can work out well.

Turn out you can make a lot of money betting $5 per electoral vote..

yk• 10 years ago

The first sentence says Hillary has a "98.2 percent chance of winning the presidency". It only gets better from there.

That is why physicists demand 99.99% (three sigma) significance before they are calling it hints. The thing is, it is absolutely true that (some) polling models predicted a 98% chance of an Hillary win. It is just the problem that these models have trouble to predict the behavior of Trump voters.

And frankly that is the problem with models. I have predicted, on reddit, that Trump would win. And I managed to do that precisely by not having a model, I just looked at the model outputs of Real Clear Politics and added a fudge factor, because usually models underestimate right wing populists, for perfectly understandable reasons. However, having a model means that you can not just add in a fudge factor, honesty demands that you have to justify each and every parameter and actually all forecasts where I did bother to look, did that. But the thing is at rather uncertain predictions like 98% the fudge factors reign.

id3• 10 years ago

If the Facebook filter bubble and new non-mainstream media outlets like infowars are the new narrative, good luck world. You will need it.

matt4077• 10 years ago

It's sad how this fetishization of "objectivity" has spread – unlike other urban legends, even smart people have bought into it.

The idea already breaks down because journalists have to make judgements when deciding on what to print – page space is limited, and that holds for the digital realm as well, if you include the prominence a story gets.

It appears these critics want journalists to judge everything without deference to prior knowledge. When they get an anonymous letter saying Obama kills puppies, it deserves the same billing as press release by the CDC about the recommended flu shots. Because it's "bias" to consider the CDC a more reliable source, or not to question the existence of this supposed "flu".

I don't know the example you're mentioning. I knew about the Fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and I learnt about it from mainstream sources. There are many clerics in islam, and maybe, in your example, it wasn't reported because it's some self-declared mufti whose opinion has no actual weight in islam? Or maybe it's a man-bites-dog situation: the intolerance within islam is well known and not "news", whereas we still hold domestic organization to a higher standard, as we should.

So here we are now. Everyone is equal. Facebook gives "the average joe (janes need not apply)" the same tools as the NYT. Let me ask you: are we better for it? Do you believe you are better informed reading a random twitter feed instead of having a subscription to the NYT or WSJ?

The answer is pretty obvious. Even Republicans marvel how easy it was to elevate what amounts to a random youtube comment threat to the national conversation. Grandpa's forwards, previously laughed at with their caps lock stuck and a tenuous grasp of basic grammar will soon be turned into laws.

SonicSoul• 10 years ago

I'd like to believe this. You seem to paint a picture of each person having objective view of reality but that has not been the case in my experience watching the online discourse. Voters on each side of the fence were so far up their asses they couldn't fathom to give a shred of doubt to their own views. The liberals had the blind spots outlined in OP article while the conservative actually believed Obama is a Muslim, he never went to law school, Hillary killed our soldiers and sent secret emails to Russia. So if the news were indeed unfiltered both sides would have some objective insight and lean one way or another, instead completely dismissing the other side as fascist or criminal.

edblarney2• 10 years ago

This is it.

There's a huge gap between the press corps today: Ivy League educated, NYC-bubble lifestyle and the rest of the country.

The bias is palpable.

And I don't like Trump.

benmcnelly2• 10 years ago

I think it is funny/sad that almost every comment online or in person, I find myself feeling I need to add "and I don't like Trump" or equivalent qualifiers, for fear of negative bias in interpretation of any statement I make.]

What happened to where being able to state your opinion or make a logical argument has to to be qualified so you don't get assumed to be racist, or sexist or whatever. I am going to try and unlearn that behavior and assume the best about people until proven otherwise.

edblarney2• 10 years ago

Ha, I agree.

But with politics, it's all biased.

I'm not 'in fear' of being called 'racist', but I think it's important to know I have no stake in the game. Political bias is a strong thing.

Because 'saying the media is biased' is a trope that you might find over in Trumpland. Even though the are biased about it, they are effectively correct.

jbmorgado2• 10 years ago

Since the beginning it was obvious the people would choose change and it actually looked like they would choose change for the better of you allowed them to (as the Bernie vs Trump polls showed).

But Democrat party decided the people knew nothing and they would just make them choose between what looked like change for the worst or for everything to continue the same.

And well, people really preferred change non the less.

Democrat party should now do some soul searching, stop blaming others for Trump election, and figure out how they allowed Hilary to manipulate so much the DNC in order to push Bernie aside.

zimpenfish2• 10 years ago

(as the Bernie vs Trump polls showed)

Those same polls also showed Clinton winning handily against Trump. You can't pick one side as proof of your argument when the other side has been proven wrong in reality.

jbmorgado2• 10 years ago

No, that's incorrect. Those polls showed Clinton leading against Trump by 3 points, and Bernie leading against Trump by 10 points.

That's a huge diference.

c0nfused2• 10 years ago

I think its more a question of discovering how they lost ohio and michigan, which are reliably blue states. What strategic nd tactical choices did they make that cause them to lose in so many states that they thought they had won. Clinton was rated 80%+ to win by everyone at the start of the night.

Is it an over reliance on polling? Likely to vote stat seems like a viable arguement

A poorer ground game? In the city I live in Trump came, sold out the colliseum, and Clinton sent Kaine who who sold out a middle school gym. This is in a blue city in a blue state.

Did they just get played by Trump and spend the entire campaign making it about him instead of about Clinton?

I don't know, but at this point they have plenty of time to try to figure it out and they really ought to. After all, it doesn't look like the greens or the libertarians are going to be a viable opposition party in 2 years

imron• 10 years ago

I think its more a question of discovering how they lost ohio and michigan, which are reliably blue states

Michigan I'll grant, but in the last 10 elections, Ohio has been blue 5 times and red 5 times, with a fairly even spread.

QuantumRoar• 10 years ago

Insulting millions of people serves no other purpose than to point out your own superiority in some way. I can't fathom how much hubris is necessary to do that without feeling ashamed of yourself.

How can it be so hard to be nice to others? Everybody disagrees with everybody else on something. Everybody has false ideas about the truth. Do we toss a kid in a meatgrinder when it has a weird idea about society? No, we include it in our discussions because opinions change when they are challenged. But when they cross the age of 16, or is it 18?, then they suddenly become demons that we need to get rid of. The cancer of our society. Where do you draw the line?

If you honestly think that you have a moral superiority that gives you the right to tell people what to do just because they are stupid (or pick any other negative attribute), then know that there are a lot of people to whom you are literally stupid (they are more intelligent and know more than you). Would it be okay if they told you what to do? If they tried to silence you? Ignored your desperate calls for help, which they think are stupid and wrong?

c0nfused2• 10 years ago

I suggest you read the vox piece from april about this phenomenon in american liberalism. They go in to exhaustive detail. http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberali...

I think that it is far to easy in the modern world to only see, meet and talk to people who think and act like you. It certainly seems that many of my friends think that America looks and acts like their friends from coast to coast. That everyone is the same, and thus that their views are universal. The press really ought to be a place where one can get information from outside the bubble not an extesnion of it.

"The press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood." Thomas Jefferson

matwood4• 10 years ago

I read that last week, and it's great. I love the part about GWB. I still know people today who call him an idiot, but it is that attitude, and underestimation that helped him win the Presidency twice.

The liberal has become synonymous with elite. If you disagree with a liberal you're uneducated, angry, racist, or pick any other disparaging word. It has caused a divide that crosses right/left, and is instead top/bottom. According to a poll NPR quoted, ~40% of registered democrats voted for Trump. That is why Hilary lost. The Republicans AND Democrats have become parties of the elite. The rise of Trump and Bernie came from those people who are rejecting elite regardless of party.

wcummings2• 10 years ago

This post-election narrative that liberals hate Trump out of elitist bigotry is killing me. People hate Donald Trump because they're afraid they'll be deported, or their friends and family will be deported. This is very real and very personal for a lot of people, I think it's lame to tell them "calm down, why can't you be nice?" and other platitudes about uniting the country.

seanmcdirmid10• 10 years ago

Ya, and let's not forget his "grab them in the kittens" remark. There is no way to explain that away, none! GWB, even though he stole the election, was much easier to accept than this guy.

We are merely afraid that Trump is as bad as he sounds, whatever the press said about him is irrelevant to that, and much more concrete than Hilary's abstract emails.

madengr5• 10 years ago

Well if they are illegal aliens (not immigrants), they should be deported.

slowmotiony12• 10 years ago

So they are afraid the actual law will be enforced, because they're criminals.

oh_sigh2• 10 years ago

So.....legal immigrants are afraid of being deported?

That's called irrational fear. It has no basis in reality.

rwmj• 10 years ago

I'm worried he might withdraw the US from NATO, also a very real worry.

atemerev2• 10 years ago

People who are afraid of being deported are illegal aliens, so they weren't able to vote.

I fully support their plight and their right (I am myself an immigrant, a legal alien for 11 years with little chance of acquiring citizenship), however, this is exactly the limit of modern democracy. Non-citizens do not vote, despite living in the country and sharing similar rights and responsibilities.

Birthright citizenship is the largest remaining privilege and discrimination out there — legally enforced, and nearly as oppressive as racial discrimination before. It was really convenient to sweep the issue under the rug — until now.

JackFr4• 10 years ago

I think you miss the point - liberals hate Trump voters.

And if your feeling is that anyone who voted for Trump is worthy only of contempt, then you truly missed the point.

Many are willing to see a failure of empathy in others but not in themselves.

id3• 10 years ago

Do you think Trump and his supporters were at any point nice and respectful?

How was Obama treated by the right wing after his election and during his presidency?

If something is racist, it's racist. That doesn't change when it's coming from a president-elect. Pointing it out is and should be okay for the media and anyone else to do.

base6982• 10 years ago

I've now seen it justified amount my Facebook peers as, "I can't accept a Trump supporter or their views because people are going to die! Don't you realize you are supporting the collapse of civilization?!"

AnimalMuppet7• 10 years ago

And they (your Facebook peers) don't seem to understand that they are helping to cause the collapse of civilization, by exactly their refusal to listen to or engage with the other side.

chongli2• 10 years ago

How can it be so hard to be nice to others?

As a Canadian, I can say this: I have no idea. It's really hard to develop a culture of niceness and it can be so very fleeting.

Just as the US has a huge cultural divide between the coastal big cities and the great middle of the country, so too does Canada between east and west as well as between Anglophone and Francophone. Yet somehow this divide in Canada is not quite as acute, not quite as mean.

Perhaps the biggest issue is that the moral fault lines constructively interfere with the cultural ones. I think of big-city vegans vs those who love BBQ and it becomes a microcosm for the rejection of all the respective cultural elements: yoga and country music, environmentalism and hunting/fishing, political correctness and religion.

investinwaffles• 10 years ago

In defense of hunting and fishing, sportsmen and their outfitters tend to be the strongest proponents of environmental protection. This distinction does somewhat favor fishing over hunting, but hunting does serve as an important backstop against explosive population growth in the absence of apex predators.

- http://fishpondusa.com/about/corporate-responsibility

- http://wamu.org/news/11/05/23/deer_overpopulation_yields_dis...

karmacoda• 10 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance

maroonblazer• 10 years ago

The amnesia in this article and many of the comments here is stupefying. Have we all forgotten the things DJT said and did throughout his campaign:

- Called Mexican immigrants rapists and murderers;

- Mocked the physically disabled;

- Used his ownership of a beauty pageant to look at naked women dressing;

- Made threats of political violence;

- Demonstrated a contempt for science;

- Put forth conspiracy theories regarding the President, HRC and climate change;

- The racist (yes, racist) comments he made regarding Judge Curiel;

And this isn't even the half of it. Let's also not forget the behavior of those who showed up at his rallies spewing hatred, racism and xenophobia. That actually happened.

Does the press have issues? Undoubtedly. But to write off the last 18 months and Tuesday's election as "smugness" is to have lost the plot.

icu6• 10 years ago

Might I humbly recommend going to www.untruthaboutdonaldtrump.com put together by philosopher Stefan Molyneux? Just please keep an open mind and do fact check as all sources are listed in an intellectually honest and transparent way.

AnimalMuppet7• 10 years ago

It's not either/or. It's both/and.

Yes, Trump has done a lot that should disqualify him. (You didn't even mention what to me is about the biggest ones: Threatened revenge on those who spoke against him.)

And yes, the article has a very valid point about the media - it really does live in its own bubble, not understanding most of the country.

madengr5• 10 years ago

Funny how the anti-trump people are now resulting to physical violence and rioting.

karmacondon• 10 years ago

Right is right and wrong is wrong. You have to stand up for the right thing even if that means telling other people that they are wrong, or even stupid.

You don't have to be smug about it, but that can be a tricky line to walk. Personally, I think it's better to advocate for certain values as respectfully as you know how and not worry about offending people who disagree. Placing too much emphasis on phrasing and tone is what people refer to derisively as "political correctness". It's best to focus more on saying the right thing, and less on how you say it

icu6• 10 years ago

I would humbly challenge your opening sentences. Right and wrong are constructs of judgement created in the human mind. So while I agree that people should stand for their beliefs I completely disagree that you have any moral authority to tell people they are wrong or stupid. I believe in a free market of ideas protected by the freedom of speech and mutual respect. I also believe that if you want to change someone's point of view you should do so with facts and reason. If your goal is to change someone's thinking outright rejection of their beliefs on the basis of biased judgement and name calling will not achieve your goal and will most likely close that person's mind.

sickbeard• 10 years ago

The unbearable smugness continues with articles like these

return04• 10 years ago

How true. Someone should tell them to shut up, and start talking for the people, not to the people.

puranjay2• 10 years ago

As a guy who once described himself as "very liberal", I have to say that I'm ashamed at the lack of empathy and the sheer smugness of my liberal friends.

There is a disease in modern liberalism about wanting to appear smart, even about things people should have no clue about.

This "wink wink, look how smart I am!" posturing is seriously misplaced and seriously off-putting.

If you want to know why Trump won, you have to start by dismantling this smugness.

icu6• 10 years ago

I mirror your stance in a way... and it is funny how this election has helped me grow as a person. I've rejected labels such as liberal or conservative and consider myself as someone who trys to overcome my natural tendency toward cognitive bias through reason and fact. Until I'm convinced that facts support reason I reserve the adoption of any belief and I always keep an open mind to new facts or stronger reasoning.

puranjay2• 10 years ago

Personally, I've made a rule that for every two pieces of liberal media I consume on an issue, I should seek at least one argument against it from a conservative.

Online, the dangers of living in an echochamber are very real

miguelrochefort2• 10 years ago

It spread to the Canadian press (at least Quebec's) like wildfire. Everything I would hear in the media was unapologetically anti-Trump. It lead to a climate where people would just assume that Trump was crazy/racist/mysogenic/untrustworthy, and further confirm their smug idea that the US is full of rednecks. Most people went along with it, and would casually mention how disgusting Trump is, without being able to name one concrete argument for it. "Trump is bad" became an axiom. I'm sure it's been similar in many other countries (including the US).

JamisonM6• 10 years ago

I think that people assumed Trump was "crazy/racist/myogenic/untrustworthy" because there is ample evidence that he really was each and every one of those things. Most of the evidence is in court documents and on tape, completely verifiable. Don't mistake being a "contrarian" for just being wrong. The media reported the facts on Trump and they assumed that facts mattered, but they did not. Or they did but no one cared about the substance of those facts and what they say about what kind of president he might be.

miguelrochefort2• 10 years ago

Perhaps you're right. I might be overlooking these traits because I don't consider these things (except for trustworthiness) very important.

return04• 10 years ago

Maybe it wasn't the press? Sure, they were completely one-sided, but look, the opponent won with 0 press by his side. So, why do we think that whatever the media said matters so much? Maybe the rhetoric of the democrats was wrong? Maybe every time hillary unconditionally pandered to minorities or women , a switch flipped inside the head of a voter?

Anyway, if you want to attribute something to the press it's their inability to doubt themselves. This actually begins in academia, where social sciences have switched from arguments to a war of punchlines. Skepticism is the foundation of science.

AznHisoka2• 10 years ago

he won precisely because he had 0 press on his side. when the press exaggerated the idiocy of trump's words and actions, that played right into the anti-establishment sentiment of voters.

as a result when trump really did do dumb things, and the press continue to make him look bad, the public would respond by saying "screw you! u elitists want to make us feel this way but we are going to respond by just not caring twice as much!"

bloat• 10 years ago

Whether they were on his side or not, they still printed every single thing he said, often in giant letters on the front page.

return04• 10 years ago

... thinking that it would deter voters, because they could not fathom that someone might actually agree with it.

hacknat• 10 years ago

I was pretty smug about Trump supporters until I started to see a couple things on/after election night:

1. Clinton underperformed Obama's numbers dramatically in the Rust belt. You can certainly still be a racist if you voted for Obama, but it doesn't necessarily follow that you're a racist if you voted for Trump. There seems to be strong evidence that a number of people in the Rust belt have voted for both men.

2. 20% of exit polled Trump voters do not think he is qualified to be president.

This was a protest vote by many reasonable(ish) people who are telling the rest of us, "We're doing so poorly right now, it really doesn't matter to us if an incompetent narcissist is President."

I honestly don't know what to do next. I've never hated Republican voters, something I seem to be accused of doing by every underlying assumption in articles about division in our country. I suspect that many people are like me, I never hated the other side, but I lost respect for them long ago. I'm going to try to get it back somehow.

GunboatDiplomat2• 10 years ago

A lot of areas around me that went for Obama in the last 2 elections went Trump this time around. And a lot of the areas that went Hillary around here went a lot less heavily Hillary than they did Obama 4 & 8 years ago. This is in suburban New Jersey.

SomeStupidPoint• 10 years ago

Im not sure there's much evidence of switching.

There are large numbers of people who didn't vote relative to the numbers that separated candidates, so the likely explanation is that people who normally dont vote voted Trump and people who normally would vote Hillary didnt vote. A little bit of those two things would tip it.

Which is what we see: high rural turnout; Hillary underperforming/low turnout in urban areas.

There's just a group of white people who like Trump, and nobody liked Hillary.

samirillian• 10 years ago

I feel like this article is also missing the point. How about the unbearable self-flagellation of the press? I voted for Hillary, but goddamn was she an uninspiring candidate! She played not to lose, and that turned out to be a bad strategy. Donald Trump didn't get some surprisingly high number of votes, Hillary just managed to be even less inspiring than we thought. And now the tone has inevitably flipped to "what did we do wrong? Maybe it was our tone of voice?" Absurd and self-absorbed! Be as smug as you like, just don't be just smug! It's not wrong to reduce Trump's appeal to racism because it's smug, it's wrong because it's wrong. It's lazy thinking. There was a lot of positive and maybe even unfair disdain for trump. But that's not why he won the election. There was also a lot of positive and maybe even unfair hatred for hillary, but that's not why she lost. One candidate was able to harness anger (the way Bernie also did) and one candidate couldn't harness any positively motivating emotions. In fact, hillary was, if anything, the fear candidate. Fear of terrorists (guised as foreign policy experience) and fear of trump himself, fear of his racism and his misogyny. And the press fed those fears, and did little else. Be an smug, who cares. Just be smug for something.

mtgx• 10 years ago

For someone looking from the outside, it seemed like 90%+ of the media were all on Clinton's payroll or had some kind of deal with her.

It was disgusting, and one of the reasons why I feared a Clinton presidency. So much of the media being unwilling to criticize her and try to destroy her opponents so easily and so intensely. This coupled with the fact that Clinton herself was paying trolls to make positive comments about her on the Internet to the point where they had full control of one of the largest subreddit's on Reddit (likely with Reddit admins' tacit approval, for the same reason Google and Twitter was banning anti-Hillary hashtags and auto-suggestions) reminded me too much of Putin's Russia (ironically enough) to be comfortable with it.

Also, NY Times was bad enough with this, I expected much more from them, but I'll never forgive or forget Washington Post's bias in this election. For a "general purpose" media entity, it was no better than Breitbart or such on the right.

And it goes without saying that CNN, and often MSNBC were even worse. Those two I've already forgotten about.

jkingsbery• 10 years ago

I like how in an article written by a liberal acknowledging how condescending the media can be to conservatives, there is a propagation of the myth that in the Middle Ages people thought sickness and demonic possession were the same thing. In fact, the Middle Ages had physicians, nurses, hospitals, and medicine. Not as advanced as ours, but modern medicine didn't just spring up from nowhere.

See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hospitals#Medieval_... - there were hospitals, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_medicine_of_Western_E... - medicine certainly involved prayer, but also involved experimenting with different materials to relieve physical symptoms.

dcposch2• 10 years ago

Yes, the corporate press was smug, hubristic, and often hilariously wrong.

I think the best journalism came from people outside the normal news.

Here are three nontraditional journalists who did excellent work:

Nate Silver did the best math.

His final election prediction is like a crash course in data science. Humble, thorough, quantifies uncertainty, acknowledges that errors may correlate. Explained in plain English and illustrated in a way that would make Edward Tufte proud. He lays out three scenarios (polling average accurate, 3-point error for Clinton, 3-point error for Trump). The latter describes in detail pretty much exactly what ended up happening.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/final-election-update-th...

Chris Arnade got the best stories.

He's a former bond trader who now travels the country as a photojournalist, befriending and talking to all kinds of people, mostly working-class and poor.

Here's his best work, in my opinion: https://medium.com/@Chris_arnade/divided-by-meaning-1ab51075...

It was the first thing that really helped me understand Trump voters.

Finally, Michael Moore nailed it.

Months ago, he wrote an essay called Why Trump Will Win, asking his liberal audience to campaign hard and not get complacent.

http://michaelmoore.com/trumpwillwin/

It came true pretty much exactly as written.

One of his speeches was taken out of context and edited down into an unofficial grassroots Trump ad. It is the single best pitch for Trump that I have heard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxDRqeuLNag

MM really understands the disenfranchised. So many lessons.

Upvoter33• 10 years ago

What I love is all the people complaining about "liberals" in such broad, stereotypical strokes - kind of ironic, no?

exabrial• 10 years ago

What an unbelievably refreshing and honest piece. I have to say it's pretty sad when Wikileaks is doing the job of the press, and the Press is doing the job of paid lobbyists. I'm pointing the statement both sides of the political debate, because it's happened to both.

Icedcool• 10 years ago

I am really enjoying pieces like this, of a dose of humility with self inspection in the wake of the Trump election. Call his election what you will, but if I see more humble news reporting, I'll call that at least some positive.

It's blowing my mind.

overcast• 10 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSfS2u-SmoI

This basically sums it all up. The news anchor deserves a promotion for saving what little dignity they still have left.

techxit4• 10 years ago

The problem is that we allowed this election to be cast as a clash between Corporate America's superego and its id. The fact that Hillary Clinton came from a middle-class Midwestern background and that, while she's absolutely terrible at optics, she's above-average for ethics and honesty among politicians... got missed. People went for raw id rather than what they perceived as the superego of a corrupt system.

I personally think that Hillary is far more liberal than she was given credit for. She's been turned into a cynical pragmatist by 20+ years of bitter experience in politics... and that's not necessarily a bad thing. I think her heart was in the right place all along. She'd probably twist arms and threaten careers of people on both sides of the aisle to get a public option passed, and that's the kind of ballbuster the country needs. However, she's the sort of person who does very well in 1-on-1 interactions but fails with rooms and groups. She has grace but no charisma. She let her self be painted as a duplicitous Establishment hack.

The irony is that Clinton and Trump voters both voted on the premise of their candidate being radically different from what they'd seen. Clinton voters believed that she was a liberal working within the establishment who'd bring us single-payer healthcare. Trump voters (except for the small percentage who actually are "deplorables", meaning racists and sexists and xenophobes) believed that Trump's dog-whistle rhetoric was just cynical game-playing. It bothers me that people accused Clinton of being "two-faced", while supporting a candidate in whom the best-case scenario is that he doesn't believe half the shit he says.

We also have a country where people hate the perceived cultural elite that is occasionally condescending ("flyover country") more than they hate the socioeconomic elite that is actually ruining their lives and that needs, for the good of red and blue staters, to be overthrown. Numbers may explain that. There are more of us in the 4.99% for them to hate than in the 0.01% that something actually needs to be done about (although I doubt that Trump is the solution).

forgottenpass• 10 years ago

It’s a profound failure of empathy

So "empathy" is the only thing keeping people from becoming complete shitstains?

Empathy is currently experiencing buzz as a positive value people like conspicuously talking about, but what happened to simple old standards?

I don't need to empathize with someone to treat them as human. Maybe this is one the kind of thing that makes people say "everyone should work in the service industry once in their lives" line, because you have to separate seething hatred from evaluating how to behave.

I would think that "not be an insufferable know better douche that considers some people beneath them and without redemption" is pretty obvious when your job is ostensibly informing the public.

AnimalMuppet7• 10 years ago

In fairness, if your job is to inform the public, feeling that you "know better" is somewhere between a job requirement and an occupational hazard.

(Actually, the "sweet spot" is where you actually know more, but don't feel like you do.)

The unbearable smugness of the press

Related Stories