The media has been getting self-reflective all of a sudden after Donald Trump’s stunning landslide of a win last Tuesday. Anchors everywhere could not fathom a Trump victory and couldn’t wait to report on polls that consistently had him second to Hillary Clinton. They now have to call him President Trump for at least four years.
After Trump proved all the polls wrong (except this one), The New York Times promised its readers that from now on it would report honestly.
Many media figures helped Trump’s competitors this past year in trying to define him as unfit for the presidency. The Huffington Post routinely called him a racist and stuck any coverage of his candidacy in the “Entertainment” section. CNN proved to be one of the guiltiest of the cable news networks, often mocking him subtly on their chyrons and not so subtly in their panel discussions, when analysts kept saying that Clinton couldn’t lose. On the weekend before the election, CNN’s Brian Stelter even hosted a special segment called Trump’s “War on the Media,” where he outlined all of the times Trump supposedly bullied the media. At the end of the program, Stelter encouraged his viewers to donate to journalism schools.
Fast forward a few days to Trump’s electoral win, and Stelter is trying to practice some humility. He admitted this weekend that viewers may have lost some “trust” in the network and that he and his colleagues have to somehow mend that relationship.
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"But chalking all of this up to a surprise victory is not enough," he said. "This was a collective failure; a failure of imagination. In some ways, a mass delusion. And the media contributed to it. So now it's time for some serious soul searching."
Of course, none of these apologies would be occurring had Hilary Clinton won.
How dare the American people have a mind of their own.
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