“After projecting a relatively easy victory for Hillary
Clinton with all the certainty of a calculus solution, news outlets like The
New York Times, The Huffington Post and the major networks scrambled to provide
candid answers.”[1] The
dynamics likely went beyond even candid answers from the media, with major
implications for how much reliance Americans should place on their
media-establishment for political information.
“You were in a bubble and weren’t paying attention to your
fellow Americans,” filmmaker Michael Moore wrote.[2]
To be sure, “all the number-crunching of state polls pointed to resounding success”
for Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College.[3]
The journalists could simply insist that they were reporting those polls. “Virtually
all the major vote forecasters, including Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight site,
The New York Times Upshot and the Princeton Election Consortium, put [Hillary]
Clinton’s chances of winning in the 70 to 99 percent range.”[4]
Even so, Chris Wallace, an anchor at Fox News, make the following observation
on election day. “A lot of media outlets made a decision sometime after the
convention that Donald Trump was beyond the pale and they no longer had to
observe the normal rules of journalism and objectivity.”[5]
Clearly this was true of The Huffington Post, which declared Hillary Clinton “cleared”
by the FBI on the Sunday before election day in spite of the fact that the
agency was still investigating the Clinton Foundation, whose fundraising may
have involved quid pro quos involving Hillary Clinton’s role as U.S. Secretary
of State.
At the very least, groupthink was in the mix, meaning that
the mainstream media was “on the same page” concerning assumptions regarding
the upcoming election. Besides their being just plain wrong, their narrowness was such that society itself
could hardly break free of the force of the narrative. Moreover, the narrowness
suggests that the power of the American media was at the time too concentrated,
such that alternative views, which can provide a check on groupthink, could not
get through. In a representative democracy, a narrow conduit by which
information is not only conveyed, but also interpreted and subject to ideology,
represents a major flaw. Put another way, that the mainstream media outlets
were all singing the same song suggests that societal debate on matters of
public policy was also very likely too narrow, and subject to everybody being
wrong in a major assumption.
Yet Wallace’s assumption that merely reporting the polls
would be objective is vulnerable. Polls can only contribute so much. The “failed
election predictions suggest that the rush to exploit data may have outstripped
the ability to recognize its limits.”[6]
Such limitations include “the potentially flawed assumptions of the people who
build predictive models.”[7]
Additionally, polling can offer only probabilities that cannot fully capture
whether the motivation to vote will actualize at the proverbial ballot-box. For
one thing, social desirability may spur poll respondents to say they will vote only
because it is a societally recognized duty. Lastly, polls prior to an election
cannot account for voters who change their decision at the time of voting.
So even the media’s common assumption that polls can and
should receive such overwhelming emphasis was faulty, and the groupthink on
this point left the electorate vulnerable to going to vote with a flawed
understanding of how Americans had been reacting to the candidates. Just as
political campaigns are not objective, journalists (and especially those who
serve as commentators) are not merely conduits for facts. Given the
subjectivity all around, a certain wideness of narrative (and assumptions) made
more likely by a less concentrated mainstream media would enhance the American
democracy.
[1] Jim
Rutenberg, “News
Outlets Wonder Where the Predictions Went Wrong,” The New York Times, November 9, 2016.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4]
Steve Lohr and Natasha Singer, “How Data Failed Us in Calling an Election,” The New York Times, November 10, 2016.
[5] Jim
Rutenberg, “News
Outlets Wonder Where the Predictions Went Wrong,” The New York Times, November 9, 2016.
[6] Steve
Lohr and Natasha Singer, “How Data Failed Us in Calling an Election,” The New York Times, November 10, 2016.
[7]
Ibid.
