“It was social media wot won it”
Trump bypassed mainstream media and won and there’s no coming back
By Peter Bale, President of the Global Editors Network
WASHINGTON, DC, — Donald Trump’s insurgent victory upends the media business and journalism as much as it does politics.
We were already worried about what Silicon Valley types call “disintermediation” — the destruction of traditional media networks and models by new technology — but he has shown that break is far deeper and dangerous than anyone realized.
At least half the American population chose not to listen to what the media was telling them: no matter how factual, passionate or full of the warnings of history.
It wasn’t a failure to get the message out. It was that the audience didn’t want to hear it.
The man was the message and the message was the man.
I like my echo chamber
Social media — starting with Trump’s own 13.7 million Twitter followers and 13.2 million Facebook “likes” — is how this American “underbelly” of white, angry, disillusioned people fueled their discontent and found their messiah. Had we watched that more closely we might have understood what was happening as this piece pointed out.
In 1992, the The Sun, a British tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, famously declared “It’s The Sun wot won it” after Conservative Prime Minister John Major won what to the then media and political elite was a surprise victory over the Labour Party.
This time it was social media, Twitter in particular, wot won it, for Donald.
It was also the rise of echo chamber sites where the visceral (even if provably wrong) fears of a white Middle America under siege in an era when a black man can be president, gays can marry and American pre-eminence doesn’t seem so certain anymore.
Breitbart.com moved from a fringe site of paranoid lunatics into the semi-official voice of Trumpism with its chairman Stephen Bannon catapulted to Trump’s right hand and presumably now to a key role in the White House. Infowars.com, the toxic outpourings of arch conspiracist Alex Jones can now be considered almost mainstream with its anti-Semitic tropes such as “Globalists to attack Trump with economic collapse”.
Dog whistle politics — baiting anti-Semites, feeding conspiracies and fostering racism and misogyny — is now the mainstream. Trump’s last election broadcast was a thinly veiled warning of a global “Jewish-led” conspiracy of the financial elite. Soros, Yellen, Blankfein: what do they all have in common? No wonder one oaf made a name for himself at a Trump rally yelling “Jew-S-A, Jew-S-A, Jew-S-A”. Welcome to the post-politically correct world.
Of course in that reading of the world the mainstream media — in many cases owned, staffed and led by Jews and therefore reinforcing the anti-Semitic trope — is part of the conspiracy, part of the global elite that has misled and stiffed the honest white, Christian, God-fearing, gun-loving ordinary “folks” of the United States.
Beating ourselves up — for now
So, what went wrong with the media?
The self-flagellation started immediately. Jeff Jarvis, a prominent journalism commentator, City University of New York lecturer and unabashed Hillary supporter blamed himself, his industry, the education system and his profession: “Mostly, I #blame my profession, media. We must undertake a harsh, honest post mortem for journalism. But I don’t know whether it will help.” Javis said on his Twitter feed.
For me the determination of the audience to ignore the medias powerfully illustrated in a bizarre confrontation between a group of Trump supporters at a rally and a New Zealand television journalist who tried to interview them.
Paddy Gower, the unassuming and pleasant host of the Newshub show tries gamely to ask a couple of Trumpists what they think only to get this shouted reply: “I’m not talking to the Clinton media, you guys are sellouts. You’re part of the lying media.”
Paddy vainly explains he is from New Zealand.“What’s Zealand?” one guy replies.
In the background, a Trumpist with a “The Deplorables” T-shirt on to mock Hillary Clinton’s unwise attack on those who hitched themselves to Trump, videos the whole incident on his iPhone declaring: “Social media is the future, the mainstream media is going downhill. You guys are like the newspapers of the 1980s. It’s almost over for you. We are the reporters…this camera in my hand.”
That is the reality of the failure this election. Not that the Washington Post, the New York Times, USA Today and hundreds of other respectable media organizations didn’t point out the fascist, anti-Semitic, misogynist, homophobic undertones of the Trump campaign. They did. It is that the audience didn’t want to hear that message and turned it off. Deliberately.
The public in middle America — Trump’s public, chose to hear a different message, a message that spoke to their sense that the white middle and working class was losing ground in a demographic and economic confrontation of civilizations. That public firmly rejected the notion of post-World War Two liberalism and post-Bretton Woods globalism.
Having a different conversation
Peter Thiel, the libertarian Silicon Valley billionaire who bankrolled Trump and also destroyed Gawker Media, suggested in a speech at the National Press Club that the media and the public heard two different Trumps.
“The media is always taking Trump literally. It never takes him seriously, but it always takes him literally,” the Washington Post reported Thiel saying. What the public heard was something more nuanced, less extreme, not literally “build a wall” but “’We’re going to have a saner, more sensible immigration policy.’ ”That disconnection, a sort of willful unwillingness to actually hear what Trump was saying and who it was appealing to is perhaps at the root of big journalism’s failure.
As Margaret Sullivan, media commentator of the Post said after the election, at least in her headline: “The media didn’t want to believe Trump could win. So they looked the other way.”
At CNN, veteran anchor John King, acknowledged the gaps the entire narrative of the election campaign that had blinded big media from even considering making a different call on the outcome: “We were not having a reality-based conversation,” he said on air.
With the possible exception therefore of the opinion polling industry — deceived again by voters who really don’t want to reveal just how mean-spirited they actually are — the media industry is a huge casualty of the Trump insurgency and now ascendency.
What to do? Get closer to the audience and learn all over again to listen as well as talk.
Ends
- A version of this commentary was published by English post-Brexit pop-up newspaper, The New European
- Peter Bale is the President of the Global Editors Network and at the time of writing the Chief Executive Officer of Washington investigative journalism non-profit, The Center for Public Integrity.
A curated list of other reporting Peter thinks worth reading — but doesn’t necessarily endorse on journalism and the Trump victory includes:
The Guardian: Facebook’s failure: did fake news and polarized politics get Trump elected?
Bloomberg News: War Between Trump, Media Seen Escalating With Presidency’s Power
Associated Press: For many supporters, Trump is a thing called hope
New York Times: How did we, how did the media, get this wrong?
New York Times: A ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ Lesson for the Digital Age
Washington Post: The media didn’t want to believe Trump could win. So they looked the other way.
Washington Post: Jeff Zucker’s singular role in promoting Donald Trump’s rise
Erin Pettigrew on Medium: How Facebook Saw Trump Coming When No One Else Did
Hollywood Reporter: Michael Wolff: Trump Win Exposes Media’s Smug Failures
