How did we get it wrong? Well, not all of us, but certainly the majority.
It’s a troubling question. Not because the media is so darn important to the democratic process – although that’s part of it. But because it may be telling us something we simply don’t want to hear.
Donald Trump was right about a couple of things, and this may be one of them.
The media is losing its insight, its personal connections to large groups of people in society. We’re hanging out with the political class, the “experts,” the journalists who agree with each other. We depend on expert pollsters who depend on samplings of the population that are just that – samplings.
Our routines keep us light years away from the fellow living in the cul-de-sac two towns over. We don’t chat with him anymore, and we only dip into his world when tragedy strikes. And then he becomes our special report and front page. Our proof that we are in touch with the little guy.
We are, as an old politician once told me, “drinking our own bathwater.” It’s a rather unappealing image that says it all.
Add social media to this silo effect of media coverage, with whole websites devoted to groups of like-minded people drinking their own bathwater, and you have a universe of isolated self-stroking, self-comforting entities. And, yes, that pretty much describes a lot of groups today.
But the media is supposed to be on guard against the seductive lure of isolationism and reassuringly simple story lines. We are supposed to question, not just authority, but ourselves as well.
Is it all our fault? No, of course, not. There are fewer journalists, fewer media sources, more pulls to post more stuff, leaving less time to actually sit down and spend quality time with people who are only in our peripheral vision.
We pick the easy ones to interview far too many times. And, not surprisingly, they corroborate our view of the world. It reminds me of the line out of Casablanca when Capt. Louis Renault says, “Round up the usual suspects.”
Would the media have believed that Hillary Clinton was going to lose if the big-city journalists had been hanging out with some community newspapers in the rust belt? Would a rust belt editor on a small paper have a better sense of the temperature of local voters?
When folks used to drop in on the editor when they went shopping, you couldn’t avoid getting an earful.
Now, we check in to Twitter where, guess what, another small group of like-minded people are drinking their own bathwater.
Perhaps even rust belt community newspaper editors don’t get out that much anymore. And big media, while their marketing departments don’t want to admit it, are also running on thinner resources.
And maybe, just maybe, nobody really wanted to look that closely at the growing support of Trump and what was inspiring it. Seeing folks who were so sick of the same political BS that they were willing to put in a crazy guy because “it can’t get worse” seems so self-destructive that it couldn’t possibly be enough to tip a whole election. Could it?
While we in the media were jumping up and down about Trump’s racism and sexism, the guy working 60 hours a week just to feed his family was saying “I don’t care who he insults, I just want a raise.”
And, yes, it’s never simple. The truth is never black and white. Perhaps in our robot-like training to make sense of things for readers, we naturally gave less weight to the anti-establishment, anti-anti-racism and anti-anti-sexism crowd, because, really, could there be that many of them out there? We don’t hang out with “those kinds of people.”
We deluded ourselves into thinking a fringe could not swing an election. We allied ourselves with pundits and experts who breathed in that same atmosphere, and we shared that view. We argued that we were not part of the elite – even though many people see us that way. We saw huge Trump rallies and continued to rationalize that they really didn’t represent a good chunk of the electorate.
We drank our own bathwater. And now we get to see a U.S. president drink his.
Pat Tracy is the editor of the Burnaby NOW and New Westminster Record.
