Your Audience Is Not An Object
There is an interesting process in play in the aftermath of the 2016 Presidential election.
While a lot of the media is focused on the chaotic ‘progress’ of the Trump administration there are many looking back to see where things went wrong.
These postmortem take in the main players in the ‘defeat’ including the complacent and entitled Democratic candidate and her team, the Democratic Party generally and corporate media (MSM), now also known as the ‘enemy of the people’.
There is no doubt that the MSM is under enormous scrutiny and pressure. Trump is pushing a very aggressive and irrational agenda on this topic in my opinion (for his own reasons) but there’s no doubt that there are multiple biases at play that influence how the MSM behaves, what it covers and how.
Putting biases aside some of the issues are structural or cultural and specifically a reliance on commentators and experts over grassroots reporting.
Overcoming and removing bias is a big problem but I loved this comment from Jay Rosen, which was included in this Best of the Left podcast.
