I blame the media

The American people were insufficiently alarmed and insufficiently informed

I am horrified and I am terrified and I am angry.

And I blame the media.

Yes, I am aware that some large number of people who voted for Trump did so fully aware that he will rule as a racist, a chaos agent, and a strongman. That’s what they want. Noted.

But a decisive subset apparently voted for him out of frustration with the economy, specifically inflation.

That they were insufficiently alarmed about the damage Trump will do – and that they actually thought he has some way to make the economy better and bring inflation down – was the result of a massive information system failure, the likes of which we’ve never seen before.

Although there is much talk about the brosphere and TikTok and podcasts and Fox News and all the other vectors for misinformation and disinformation in this current media environment, the traditional media is not off the hook, quite the contrary.

For one, elite media has tremendous influence on the national discourse, all the way down to TikTok and social media.

But more directly, the vast majority of voters still have some contact with the major traditional media outlets, including the broadcast networks, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, the New York Times and the Washington Post.

So what they hear and read there still matters.

By the Numbers

According to the Pew Research Center:

• More than two-thirds of Americans – 68 percent – say that broadcast network news (ABC, NBC or CBS) is either a major or minor source of their political news.

• That includes 54 percent of Republicans and those who lean Republican.

• Just over half – 53 percent – of Americans get some or much of their news from CNN. And that includes 35 percent of Republicans.

• Almost one in four Republicans – 24 percent – say they get some or much of their news from the New York Times.

And according to the exit polls:

• Three in four voters – 73 percent – said they were either angry or dissatisfied with “the way things are going in the U.S.”

• Voters said the economy is in bad shape by a 67 to 32 margin.

• Two out of three voters who said inflation was the most important factor for their vote voted for Trump, according to AP VoteCast.

What They Didn’t Know

What voters heard and read in traditional news outlets didn’t dissuade them from swallowing the right-wing narrative that the country is in decline, with an economy in shambles, with crime up, and with undocumented immigrants terrorizing people everywhere – none of which are true.

As an Ipsos report just before the election put it, ever so delicately, “Americans who answer questions about inflation incorrectly are more likely to prefer Trump over Harris on the economy. The same pattern holds true on immigration and crime.”

Most notably, it’s a fact that Joe Biden managed to steer the American economy into an almost impossibly unlikely soft landing after the Covid crisis, making the U.S. economy the envy of the world.

I doubt any Trump voters believe that is true -- in part because of how viscerally inflation affects every household, but also in part because all along the way, the traditional media didn’t explain it to them.

There was wall-to-wall coverage of inflation, especially as related to gas and eggs. But there was almost no mention of the fact that inflation was lower than in most other developed countries. And as prices began to stabilize, the coverage made it sound like their not going down was an economic failure. (Of course they didn’t go down, except of course gas prices, and how many stories have you seen about that? Not a whole lot.)

Sometimes it appeared that newsrooms were actively trying to make Biden look bad – even when the news was good. One of my favorite examples was a New York Times headline that made job growth and low unemployment look like a bad thing: “The U.S. added 199,000 jobs in December as employers struggled to find workers.” Like many stories of its kind, this one stated as fact that the economy would be a drag on Biden’s political ambitions.

Economics coverage in traditional outlets looked like it had come from the Fox News assignment desk. The stories were mostly doom-and-gloom -- even when you could see the good Biden was doing if you only looked for it.

As economist Dean Baker recently explained:

We saw the longest stretch of low unemployment in 70 years. Unemployment rates for Blacks, Black teens, and Hispanics all hit or tied record lows. While taking a dip in 2021-2022, real wages have bounced back and are above their pre-pandemic peaks, especially for workers at the bottom end of the wage distribution.

There has been a record pace of new business formation. Workers report record high levels of workplace satisfaction. The number of workers who can work from home has increased by almost 20 million. And more than 14 million homeowners were able to refinance their mortgages, either getting cash out for other purposes or saving thousands of dollars a year on interest payments.

This was in spite of a worldwide pandemic that initially sent employment plummeting, and then inflation soaring, as supply chain bottlenecks created shortages of many goods. The US recovery has been by far the strongest of any wealthy country, and its inflation rate by many measures is now below the average for other rich countries.

I dare you to go back and find more than a tiny handful of stories from any of our major news organizations about the fruits of the massive investments made through the Inflation Reduction Act.

Some 16 million new jobs were created during the Biden presidency. I dare you to back and find me more than a tiny handful of interviews with people who got jobs in the Biden economy.

Inflation-adjusted wages are actually up during the Biden presidency, especially for low-income workers. Did you read about that anywhere?

Here, for instance, were some of the story ideas I suggested in May. Did you see any of those in the wild? I didn’t.

• President Biden has forgiven about $153 billion in debt for 4.3 million student borrowers, and is proposing rules that would provide relief for about 25 million more. (That would about 1 in 11 Americans in total.) Find some of them and ask them how they’re feeling compared to four years ago.

• A new rule that takes effect in July makes 4 million lower-paid salary workers newly eligible for overtime pay. Find some of them and ask them how they feel about it.

• Stock markets are at all-time highs. Find someone with a 401(K) and ask them how they feel about it.

Perhaps even more importantly, the media allowed the public to believe that Trump would actually somehow fight inflation.

The reality, as a few articles explained, is that Trump has no plan to bring down inflation and what economic plans he does have – tariffs -- are in fact highly inflationary. (He also glibly predicted that energy prices would drop sharply.)

Overall, the mythology that a vote for Trump was a vote against inflation was never successfully exposed as a lie by the mainstream media, as it should have been. So it took root. It did incalculable damage.

And of course, as I’ve written about ad nauseum, the traditional media generally failed to sound the alarm about just how unstable, unhinged, racist and fascist Trump is. They made it sound like voting for Trump was not a radical, extremist choice – just a partisan one.

Most recently, I begged the network news anchors to engage in a Cronkite moment and speak the unvarnished truth about Trump’s mental incapacity. They didn’t.

Instead of reporting honestly about how Trump’s campaign was based on lies, the traditional media fudged.

They fundamentally failed to inoculate their readers and viewers against the tidal wave of disinformation from Trump and the right-wing media ecosystem.

I’ll be blunt. If major media organizations had taken my advice – or the similar advice from countless other progressive media critics -- I think the message would have seeped into the news diets of enough people that I don’t think Trump would have won.

So yes, I blame the media.