Well, you’ve all known this for a while: There’s a huge liberal bubble in the news media — and they’ve completely missed the rise of Trump. FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver ran a nine-part series on media coverage of the 2016 election, and he notes how lack of diversity, decentralization and independence is the basis of this bubble. We all know that newsrooms are almost unabashedly liberal, with thousands of these journalists convening at the same events (and in the same rooms), and all based in New York or Washington. He noted the similarities between the 2016 election and the Brexit vote, where those predicting a Remain victory or a Clinton victory came from those urban centers of liberalism, respectively. Yes, some may have ventured into Trump country, but Silver noted that a) they came with “pre-prepared narratives”; and b) they never considered the facts that didn’t fit the narrative. Worse, they ignored those opposing views and the impact they could have on the Electoral College, the only competition that matters in a presidential election.
Silver said he read James Surowiecki’s book “The Wisdom of Crowds” to figure out what’s creating a bubble for liberal news sources. There are four points, though the last one — aggregation — isn’t really a problem for political journalists or anyone who wants to share information. But the other three — diversity, independence and decentralization — are a disaster:
I recently reread “The Wisdom of Crowds,” which, despite its title, spends as much time pondering the shortcomings of such wisdom as it does celebrating its successes. Surowiecki argues that crowds tend to make right predictions when they meet these four conditions [emphasis mine]:
- Diversity of opinion. “Every person should have private information, even if it is just an eccentric interpretation of known facts.”
- Independence. “People’s opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them.”
- Decentralization. “People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.”
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Diversity of opinions? For starters, American newsrooms are not very diverse in terms of thoroughbred Or sex lines and that’s it It is not clear whether the situation is improving significantly.6 And in a country where the level of education is an increasingly crucial predictor cultural and political behavior, some 92 percent of journalists have a diploma of higher education. A diploma was not once In fact prerequisite7 in the case of reporters’ work; in 1982, only 70 percent of journalists had a higher education, and in 1971, this percentage was only 58 percent.
The political diversity of journalists is also not very gigantic. In 2013, only 7 percent of them identified as Republicans. (Although only 28 percent identified themselves as Democrats, and most said they were independents.) And while it’s not a perfect approximation — in most newsrooms, the people who endorse are not the same ones who do the reporting — there’s reason to believe the industry was particularly out of sync with Trump. Of the major newspapers that endorsed either Clinton or Trump, only 3 percent (2 of 59) supported Trump. In comparison, 46 percent newspapers that supported Barack Obama or Mitt Romney supported Romney in 2012. Moreover, as the media has become less representative of right-wing views—and conservatives have rebelled against the political establishment—there has been a widening and perhaps self-perpetuating divide between conservative news and opinion media such as Breitbart and other media.
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Independence? This is an equally earnest problem. Crowds can be wise when people think a lot for themselves before they meet to exchange views. But for at least days “Boys on the bus,,political journalism has suffered from a herd mentality. Events like conventions and debates literally bring thousands of journalists together in the same room; attend one of these events and you can almost smell the conventional wisdom being produced in real time. (Consider how consensus was reached (Romney won the first debate in 2012, when it was just starting.) Social media — Twitter in particular — can amplify these information cascadesand one tweet receives hundreds of thousands of views and shaping the way of approaching whole problemsAs a result, it may be largely arbitrary which stories gain traction and which do not. What seem like a multitude of perspectives may actually be just one or two, repeated over and over again.
Decentralization? Surowiecki writes about the benefits of local knowledge, but the political news industry in Washington and New York has become increasingly consolidated as local newspapers suffered from a decade-long spasm. But that doesn’t mean local reporters in Wisconsin, Michigan or Ohio should have picked up on Trump vibes. contradiction to the polls. But as we argued, National reporters often flew into these states with ready-made narratives—for example, that they were “less and less representative of contemporary America“— and they adapt the facts to their needs, neglecting their importance to the Electoral College. A more geographically decentralized group of reporters might have asked more questions, such as why Clinton didn’t campaign in Wisconsin, or why it wasn’t a bigger problem for her that she was struggling in traditional polls like ohio AND Iowa. If local newspapers were in better economic shape, they could also commission more high-quality state polls.; the lack of good polls was especially a problem in Michigan and Wisconsin.
There you have it. Local newspapers can be a vital counterweight to the growing, dominant liberal news bubble. The news bubble is overwhelmingly populated by reporters from liberal strongholds. That can lead to certain issues being missed. What’s more, you can see how simple it was for urban reporters to think Clinton would win in a landslide, which is why those areas also became hotbeds of progressive tantrums after she lost. There’s another America outside the cities. The news media ignored it. And they retaliated by cutting Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions. Also, if you want to read someone who has been digging into small-town America for a long time, well before the 2016 election, read Salena Zito. She was the first to see that a leaderless, neo-populist wave was bubbling through rural America. A wave that ultimately put Donald J. Trump in the White House. Read your local newspaper, too.
