Seldom in media history have so many worked so hard – to wallow in angst. “I think it’s time for all journalists to turn our back on polls …” tweeted ITV’s anchor-of-the-night Tom Bradby, as he might well have done after June 2016 or May 2015 too. Yes: the polls were all over the place again, predictions based on them similarly frail. Again. Plentiful egg splattered innumerable august faces.
But if every debacle has one inevitable following mantra – the one about “lessons to be learned” – what are the lessons for journalists here? Before it happens. Again.
Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times saw the faultline OK: “It was a failure to capture the boiling anger of a large portion of the American electorate that feels left behind by a selective recovery, betrayed by trade deals that they see as threats to their jobs and disrespected by establishment Washington, Wall Street and the mainstream media.”
Politico turned that “boiling” stuff into a “primal scream”. Cue Margaret Sullivan, lately NY Times ombudsperson: “Although these voters shouted and screamed it, most journalists just weren’t listening … They couldn’t believe that the America they knew could embrace someone who mocked a disabled man, bragged about sexually assaulting women, and spouted misogyny, racism and antisemitism. It would be too horrible. So, therefore, according to some kind of magical thinking, it couldn’t happen.”
Enter the Daily Mail with its own pat lectures about “liberal elites” while chastened commentators on America’s biggest liberal dailies (and broadcast channels) vowed to get out of the Manhattan/DC bubble and listen to Joe Sixpack again. But is this, in turn, any __more than a kneejerk reaction?
If you spend your life sitting in front of terminals in New York – or WC1 – you may feel out of touch and wallow in self-reproach. But no fewer than 229 American daily papers and 131 weeklies endorsed Clinton, as opposed to nine dailies and three weeklies for Trump. Those are papers, often little papers, spread across the length and breadth of the nation. Their editors survive by representing their communities. And they missed the big story too.
You didn’t, in short, have to be sitting on your bottom, far away, to be shocked. Indeed, maybe sitting on your bottom might have been the best vantage point for truth: set Trump’s Facebook page last week, with its 11.9m likes and his 12.9m Twitter followers, against Clinton’s 7.8m and 10.1m. Or, with Professor Pablo Boczkowski at Northwestern University, compare one Trump campaign post on Facebook with 92,000 likes, 40,000 loves, and 29,000 shares, plus 2.1m video views, against a similar Clinton post with 14,000 likes, 1,300 loves, 1,965 shares, and just 218,000 video views.
Was this election lost, under the radar, on social media? Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab railed against the “sewer” of Facebook that doesn’t “care about the truthfulness of the news it posts”. Or was a Republican victory always likely anyway? Here’s Professor Larry Bartels of Vanderbilt University, one of America’s best political scientists, concluding in a Washington Post piece that “an extraordinary campaign has produced a remarkably ordinary election outcome, primarily reflecting partisan patterns familiar from previous election cycles”.
Just look at state election results during 2016, he argues, and they’re much like those national exit polls, which showed Clinton winning 89% of the vote among Democratic identifiers and Trump winning 90% among Republicans. “These percentages precisely match those in 2008, the last time there was no incumbent president on the ballot … To a good approximation, Trump won because the overwhelming majority of Republicans voted for the Republican candidate, undeterred by the qualms of party leaders and conservative intellectuals.”
In short it was either an earthquake, or it wasn’t. In sum, the primal screams may only have been familiar grumps. Data – and data journalism – still provides questions, not answers. And there’s no logical reason why those questions have ended now.
Look at the exit polls. Only a single percentage-point __more of American female voters went for Clinton than for Obama in 2012. Some 53% of white women went for Trump. Twenty-nine per cent of Hispanics – 8% more than last time around – voted Republican. A majority of voters earning under $50,000 a year still voted Democrat. And if you want broader popular vote comparisons with 2012, then Trump, with 60,037,301 votes (47.7% of the total) was only on or around Mitt Romney’s 69,933,504 (47.2%).
There wasn’t a primal scream or a Trump surge: there was simply a slide in Clinton’s performance. She lost more than he won. And there are any number of explanations for that – from hatred to indifference toward a “remote and robotic candidate” (the FT). Which doesn’t, naturally, mean turning those explanations into apparent fact by choosing places and interviewees who exemplify the thesis. Find a dodgy poll and make it flesh. Back to the Rust Beltway: back to the future.
The plain fact, when you looked in on America and the world’s newsrooms last Tuesday evening, is that you saw assumptions shredded, maps suddenly redrawn, wise men gasping for breath. “We’ve not been having a reality-based conversation,” said the admirable John King on CNN, swimming in an ocean of imponderables.
Did the media fail to warn America about Trump, or did America register his flakiness (see numerous polls) but take no notice? (Jack Shafer on Politico.) Is Trump a triumph for Brexit, as Farage would have it; “a reminder to those in Britain who defy the will of the people”, as Richard Littlejohn inevitably puts it? Or are “Brexit and Trumpism very different beasts”, as Tim Montgomerie, apostle of Brexit, says in the Times? There are no pat lessons in this “bonfire of the certainties” (the FT again). Any thesis, or combination of theses, can play.
Still, I wish that my old friend and former White House correspondent Pat Sloyan hadn’t just sent me the oldest, most chilling thesis of the lot – from America’s greatest journalist, HL Mencken, in 1920. “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”