Facing the facts
How the liberal media can rebuild after Brexit and Trump
Donald Trump wanted to win American hearts.
Liberal journalists wanted to win American minds. They wanted to be the ones to break the stories that got everyone talking and to analyse what was going on in a way that everyone could understand. They wanted to scrutinise both people running for the White House and to debate policy with reason. This is what the liberal media always wants to do.
These two goals produced two different conversations in the run-up to November 8th. Trump’s quest saw him deal out smooth myths and misinformation that flew over the top of the noise from the liberal media — and were ultimately louder.
At best the liberal media fought Trump’s style, chucking facts and data into the debate. At worst the liberal media smugly mocked Trump and his supporters. In any case what happened is that the liberal media didn’t manage to ground the debate in the land of data, reason and scrutiny that we prefer. It is worth noting that we don’t prefer this land because it favours one side over the other; we prefer it because we believe it’s the fairest place to have the debate.
So the liberal media carried on reporting Trump’s behavior with ever more incredulity, hoping that gradually, surely, finally his supporters would come and sit down for a proper debate with the facts (they would also, incidentally, ditch Trump). This hope is surely one of the motivations that drove my colleagues and me at The Economist. Our correspondents broke shoe leather while travelling across America: north, south, east and west, they attended rallies, chatted to people in bars and cafes, and pressed congressional candidates from both parties on policy. Good old-fashioned reporting.
I worked with our correspondents from my base in London and then, during the 7 weeks before the election, in Washington DC. I filtered their reporting through our designers, editors, developers, picture editors, film and podcast producers, and other social media colleagues to distribute it around the internet. I’ve blogged in more detail here about our method to focus on the facts and our analysis while others focused on the personality war. We wanted our approach of rational debate to prevail. Fortunately, plenty of people liked our output: they commented to say so and they also gave us an uptick in subscriptions. Here’s one happy customer:
But we hoped for more than that. Surely at some point in this year-long circus the majority of people would start seeing sense? That’s not what happened. Trumpers rejected the liberal media right up to November 8th, and voted for their man.
So liberal media didn’t fail for not preventing Trump from winning (that had been the job of Hillary Clinton, not journalists). No, liberal media failed by assuming that rational scrutiny would prevail.
Trump’s victory is not the first such naive assumption made by journalists this year. Britain’s vote to leave the EU, another political upset driven by myths and misinformation, showed exactly the same pattern. Anti-EU politicians openly rejected facts and expertise, and instead spoke directly to how people felt. “My town is dull, work is difficult to find, there are too many foreigners, and I’m pretty sure that Brussels is somehow to blame.” Meanwhile liberal media soldiered on wheeling in the buckets of data that, ultimately, not enough people cared for. Boris Johnson was just far more beguiling.
Trump and Brexit show that something has shifted in the relationship between politics and the media. Liberal media, wanting to steer political debate, has made a tactical error.
As Clay Shirky puts it:
The liberal journalist has become the playground equivalent of the kid with a clipboard blowing the whistle on the football game because it’s time to go back to class. Trump is the loud kid who knows the other kids want to continue, even when the clipboard kid says doing so would hurt their grades. Trump blows a raspberry at the clipboard kid. Everyone cheers and plays on. The liberal journalist just isn’t cool enough to win that argument. And now, with countries making self-destructive votes for Brexit and Trump, it is not right that the liberal journalist shrugs and says ‘we did what we could’.
We just need better tactics. I don’t know what they are, but if we follow Trump’s example, I’d have to say that they are grounded in personality and emotion.
Charlie Beckett, a professor of media at the LSE has argued that journalists need to use emotion more in their reporting, and I agree there’s something in that. There are plenty of data that show emotional online news videos are among the most widely shared. We know this works. In fact, it’s old news; journalists often use a heart-wrenching personal story of someone to represent a demographic trend. Campaigners are doing this more and more, too, as in the case of Yashika Bageerathi. They say that even when it doesn’t work, it changes the course of the debate for the better. Perhaps the task of someone like me, who seeks to find clever ways to share analytical, data-driven stories on social media, is to give extra prominence to those emotional moments. If we want facts in the mix too, perhaps we need to fold them in just like how your mum snuck peas into your mashed potatoes.
And finally, on personality. The liberal media might be tempted to put more effort into building personalities. Journalists already put a lot of work into this (not at The Economist, of course, which doesn’t run by-lines), but if they continue with it then they need to think carefully about tone. It is just about possible to be a cool kid with a clipboard — someone like John Oliver maybe — but such people are superstars and they are too few.
We need more personalities but they need to be careful not to be smug. Smugness may be grounded in reason and data, but it’s not a good look. Instead we’d have to rely on connecting with people emotionally. Social media, especially Twitter, help to make journalists into personalities, but simply being loud and present isn’t good enough. You’ve got to be cool too.
Pop stars know this. Engineers don’t. I happened to be at a conference of engineers a couple of years ago. The special guest was will.i.am, a pop star who loves engineering. He told the googly-eyed nerds that more kids would see engineering as a career option if only engineers made a glittery fuss about it, like how the music and film industries do. You could now say the same about journalism. We can still have the same content but just package it better, by listening and fitting it into how people want to hear it.
Facts aren’t over. We just need to think tactically about how to get them to more people.
