In some European communities, Christians sought to avoid or mitigate plague with processions of men whipping themselves bloody as they moaned through the narrow streets.
Those unfailingly ineffective attempts to appease a loving god came to mind as I followed the comments of today’s penitent political journalists.
One after another, reporters and commentators whipped themselves through the news media and blogs for under-estimating Trump’s presidential aspirations.
Until recently, the possibility that this vulgarian might speak for the Grand Old Party of Ike, Taft, George I and II and Ronny was so remote that it wasn’t a story.
Trump was so absurd that The Huffington Post wrote, “After watching and listening to Donald Trump since he announced his candidacy for president, we have decided we won’t report on Trump’s campaign as part of The Huffington Post’s political coverage. Instead, we will cover his campaign as part of our Entertainment section. Our reason is simple: Trump’s campaign is a sideshow. We won’t take the bait. If you are interested in what The Donald has to say, you’ll find it next to our stories on the Kardashians and The Bachelorette.”
HuffPost wasn’t unique. Too many journalists ignored vital political stories rather than stray from mainstream news media’s serial conventional wisdoms.
First, Trump is a follower, not a leader; he is an echo chamber for his supporters. He’s that politician chasing the crowd shouting, “Wait for me! I’m your leader.”
Second, Americans rejected the GOP conservative message offered by Trump’s competitors. Instead, Republican primary voters erupted in a populist bloc that set aside just about every religious and cultural value in their desire to throw the rascals out.
Other aspirants — Bush, Cruz, Rubio, Fiorina, Carson, Kasich, etc. — are the rascals or their lackies.
Among the more candid and possibly remorseful journalists is the New York Times’ Nate Cohn, whose contrition appeared in the column, “The Upshot.”
“I do think we — and specifically, I — underestimated Mr. Trump. There were bad assumptions, misinterpretations of the data, and missed connections all along the way.”
Cohn began his coverage of the GOP primaries last year with the mistaken assumption that “an establishment-backed candidate had an advantage against a conservative outsider, despite the turn toward Tea Party conservatives in Congress. Polling data showed they were well educated and moderate — natural allies for the establishment.”
That was “completely wrong … Republicans in these states were no allies of the establishment.” They wouldn’t even buy into Cruz, the most successful conservative outsider.
“This could just be the result of a simple analytical error: conflating opposition to ideologically consistent conservatives with an affinity for establishment-backed candidates,” Cohn wrote. “I thought the party’s establishment could count on these voters, and instead they were among Mr. Trump’s strongest backers in the end.”
Cohn’s penitential essay is well worth reading. It concludes:
“We (journalists) were just overconfident. There haven’t been very many presidential elections in the modern era of primaries. There certainly haven’t been enough to rule out the possibility that a true outsider could win the nomination, even if it seemed very incongruent with what had happened in the post-reform era. That’s a lesson to keep in mind heading into the general election.”
Don’t bet on it. I’m anticipating another plague of journalistic misdirection and what-ifs after Jan. 20 when the 2020 campaign begins.
Fellow Timesman and media reporter Jim Rutenberg put it this way: “Wrong, wrong, wrong — to the very end, we got it wrong.”
There are plenty of reasons, “But in the end, you have to point the finger at national political journalism, which has too often lost sight of its primary directives in this election season: to help readers and viewers make sense of the presidential chaos; to reduce the confusion, not add to it; to resist the urge to put ratings, clicks and ad sales above the imperative of getting it right.
“Every election cycle brings questionable news coverage. … But this season has been truly spectacular in its failings. … The mistakes piled up — the bad predictions, the overplaying of every slight development of the horse race to the point of whiplash, the lighthearted treatment of what turned out to be the most serious candidacy in the Republican field.”
However, Rutenberg ends on a classic, pious hope worthy of medieval Christian flagellants hoping to avoid the plague, “With Mr. Trump heading for the general election, news organizations will get a second chance to rethink how they approach the race still to come and see how they can avoid the problems of the primaries.”
Eventually, huffingtonpost.com relented, returning Trump to the politics pages, saying, “Now that Trump, aided by the media, has doubled down on the cruelty and know-nothingness that defined his campaign’s early days, the ‘can you believe he said that?’ novelty has curdled and congealed into something repellent and threatening — laying bare a disturbing aspect of American politics.
We believe that the way we cover the campaign should reflect this shift. And part of that involves never failing to remind our audience who Trump is and what his campaign really represents.”
Will Bunch, writing in philly.com, said, “Nowhere are there more recriminations — and more self-flagellation, much of it deserved — than among the news media … one thing is clear. The major news outlets did a lousy job anticipating and understanding the Trump movement because of a toxic soup that is partly our lack of time/resources but more often just elitism and snobbery, larded with some laziness.”
I’ll give the final mea culpa to the Times’ house Republican/conservative, David Brooks, in his op-ed column, “We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.”
“Socially intermingled?” Can’t Brooks just say he doesn’t talk with or listen to people outside his affluent, New York milieu?
That’s not good enough. With so many penitents, it’s obvious that institutional blindness in the nation’s leading daily can be pervasive.
Meanwhile, Cincinnati news media and audiences are on the receiving end of an impoverished national news consensus shaped in the New York-Washington corridor.
CURMUDGEON NOTES:
• During a recent holiday in Rome, BBC World Service kept us up to date on wildfire ripping through Canadian province of Alberta and city of Ft. McMurray.
Now, I’m following the disaster in the Enquirer, on BBC World Service overnight on WVXU-FM, and on the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. website.
It’s personal.
My folks lost their home and escaped with charred clothes when a California wildfire unexpectedly changed directions and roared more than 10 miles into their neighborhood.
As you read this, I’m fishing at our remote cabin in Northern Ontario. En route to the landing where I park and get into my boat, there is a provincial sign saying whether it’s too dry even for outdoor cooking fires. We take forest fires that seriously.
It’s our good fortune that CBC-FM from Sudbury is first-rate when it comes to hazardous weather. Last Fall CBC began frequent marine warnings about imminent storms with very high winds. Our village and lake were going to take a hit.
I left a day early while it still was relatively calm; my 16-foot fishing boat would not survive predicted winds if I waited too long to start my planned trip home.
If there is a wild fire in the forests around us, CBC will let me know. Cabin owners don’t fight fires. We flee. I’ll grab my car keys and passport and head into the middle of our large lake.
That’s where it could get ugly. If the fire is coming from the south along the only road from the Trans-Canada Highway to our lake’s car park and landing, I’m doubly screwed. My car’s probably toast, but if it’s untouched, the only road out is… south.
Finally, news from Alberta should suggest a reboot to Reaganites. Remember when he said, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”?
Tell that to the almost 90,000 residents of Alberta who relied on authorities and communal ties to safely evacuate their homes as the wildfire advanced.
When residents couldn’t drive out, about a third of them were airlifted to safety from the oil field facilities where they’d taken shelter north/upwind of the fire zone.
However fiercely partisan, Canadians tend to respect and trust their governments — territorial, provincial and federal — in ways we do not. I’d like to think this reflects the absence of a national Canadian party devoting decades to undermining confidence in government.
• The Alberta disaster recalled stories of the great 1894 fire that destroyed rural Hinckley, Minn., part of the history on which I was raised in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. There was no big government to help and no one knows how many people died.
• Based on the post-fire experiences of my parents and their friends and neighbors in California, I expect that CBC and dailies in Alberta still will have their hands full when the immediate fire danger ends.
Every level of government will be stressed to provide support to families who lost everything. Canadian tax revenues already are suffering from steep declines in oil prices and foreign markets for its mining products.
The financial disaster will be worse if the fire reaches so-far-untouched tar sands oil facilities. Even temporary Ft. McMurray housing won’t help if returning residents have no jobs.
News media will be able to find individual tragedies and collective problems among displaced Ft. McMurray residents: suicides, increased alcohol, drug and child abuse and domestic violence. Hospitals and physicians will face unprecedented demands from tens of thousands of evacuees and the provincial government might have to help refugees recreate their personal health records to assure access to care.
Related stories will follow attempts of nonprofits, religious groups and social agencies to cope.
Even if the oil patch survives and prices revive, journalists will have plenty to do as Ft. McMurray local businesses decide whether to rebuild. Just as some residents won’t return, some businesses won’t reopen.
This is a story that won’t end soon if the news media have the staying power.
• BBC did a fine job of covering primaries leading to Cruz/Kasich surrenders. It was our go-to news source for a couple weeks in Rome. As I’ve written before, I prefer to follow American elections on foreign news media, whether online, in print or broadcast. Less bullshit, greater variety of sources.
• Wandering around side streets in Rome, we stopped at a shop that displayed modern, tiny metal figures of Hitler and his mentor, the blustering strongman, Mussolini. Figures included Mussolini as the uniformed leader who dragged Italy disastrously into WWII, promising to make the nation great again. Others figures showed him in civilian clothes as he led the infamous 1922 “march on Rome” when his Fascist Party and its violent Black Shirts staged a coup and took power.
• Finally, it was a pleasure to hold and read broadsheet newspapers again, especially the International New York Times sold in Rome. And Italian dailies reminded me of my first impression of European press in 1960: vivid offset color on almost every page while Americans were still trying to figure out the technology.
This article appears in May 11-18, 2016.