Two interesting and prescient things happened in the hours before America plunged into a nail-biting Tuesday night and an election that turned out to be far closer than anticipated. Both reveal much about perils faced by our democracy, as stoked by a disruptive president without care for its essential framework and a news media that mostly has abandoned its traditional, straight-shooting role and now needs to recalibrate and search its soul.
One thing was that The New York Times had to recall a tweet in which the paper had, in essence, credited those like itself with deciding presidential elections.
"The role of declaring the winner in a presidential election in the U.S. falls to the news media," the paper of record tweeted, self-importantly. "The broadcast networks and cable news outlets have vowed to be prudent."
Most Americans were under the impression that the role of declaring a winner in a presidential election fell to the American people and the state authorities charged with certification. Not the candidates, and certainly not the partisan pundits with their touch screens, dubious data-crunching skills and op-eds.
Sure, the news media gets to report, analyze and predict the results, just as the candidates get to spin and bluster all they want. But in a democracy, however much the media wants to put its finger on the scales, the voters decide. Readers can react to investigative reporting on, say, Trump's taxes with a shrug. Veteran newspeople know they often do, and they do the right thing and report it anyway. Some even still acknowledge that it is their readers' right to pay no attention whatsoever.
On Tuesday afternoon, the Drudge Report — a historically right-leaning news aggregator that had turned hostile against President Donald J. Trump in recent months — headlined that Trump, should he lose as expected, was planning to head up a new media empire. This was to be a rival to Fox News and, in Trump's partisan view, a righteous counterbalance to the "fake news" of CNN. Drudge further headlined that Rupert Murdoch had said he would welcome the challenge. Those will little tolerance for right-wing media outlets contemplated the ongoing presence of a hydra or, to employ a tennis metaphor, a news-doubles pair ready to bat back the balls hit over the net by CNN and MSNBC.
What did both of these events foretell?
For starters, they were both indicators of the perilous state of this unified democracy and, as if we needed another reminder, of the dangers of operating in the kind of echo chamber that the fusion of social and news medias have built for their own profit.
No doubt much discussion transpired at the Times, as at all media outlets, about the perils of calling races too early and repeating the well-documented mistakes of the past: these powerful predictions can and do influence not just perceptions but subsequent actions, which likely explains Trump's fury at Fox News' decision (Fox News!) to call the state of Arizona for Joe Biden early in the night, setting up a new momentum for the former vice president.
But it is all too easy, when immersed in the caldron, for brainiacs in the media to forget about their actual role and start to believe they are acting for all those less-smart voters out there who are not able to think for themselves. This danger is yet more acute when journalists are working alone in their basements, getting feedback only through terse online messaging systems and reading a self-selected social media stream unlikely to challenge those perceptions.
If Tuesday night revealed one thing, it is that voters don't care to be told what to do. The Latinx voters of Miami-Dade County in Florida certainly wanted to make up their own minds and, of all the things the media missed, Trump's impressive performance among nonwhite voters was perhaps the most striking of all.
That Times tweet embodies that hubristic attitude and is indicative of the ideological conformity developing in some newsrooms where highly educated elites dominate and fail to read the tea leaves outside of their own feeds. This tendency is exacerbated by the rewards in the media business now coming more from creating content designed to please like-minded digital subscribers rather than actually reflecting the realities on the all-American ground, which is, in fact, the American media's main job.
One it pretty much failed on Tuesday night.
And what of Trump's plans to monetize his own self-evident popularity?
Even those who despise him surely can't fail to see that this is a good idea for him, once he is done with the White House, given the uncritical and expanding enthusiasm he evidently enjoys among his base supporters. In that arena, he will be able to bluster and bloviate without worry about fact-checkers pointing out that stealing elections and counting votes are not, in fact, the same thing. He will be able to opine while doing less damage to the inherent underpinnings of the democratic structure, and there will be a strong market for his views and his personality. That much was revealed Tuesday night. For Trump, one day, a full-time media job will be a good match. And he won't have to reconcile it with the truth-telling imperatives of actual political leadership.
One half of America maybe will tune in to him. The other half of America will remain mystified, and appalled, by his appeal. They might take some solace in what happened in Arizona, where Trump's performance was far less than he had hoped, following endorsements of Joe Biden by the state's former senator, Jeff Flake, and by Cindy McCain, the widow of another former senator from Arizona.
"Arizona is John's McCain's final revenge," former Chicago mayor turned pundit Rahm Emanuel said on ABC on Tuesday night, as the pivotal results came in. Emanuel was referencing Trump's attacks on the late war hero, offensive dismissals of the former prisoner of war seemed to emanate from a Trumpian sense of personal grievance, one that will work just fine on Twitter and cable TV. Cue up the ads for pillows and quackery.
But, politically, Emanuel was right. There is still such thing as a bridge too far — at least in Arizona — and thus still hope for the union.
