Elections are basically controlled by the media. They publish the news you consume, filtered through their editorial stance. They control the narrative. It’s all headlines, clickbait and eyeballs, only in this century it’s done algorithmically through social media too. You are never getting an unfiltered, unbiased opinion of the state of affairs, you are getting a carefully curated snapshot.
While there is still more nuance to it than that, there is still truth. In the UK, one of Rupert Murdoch’s papers The Sun likes to boast about their political influence on voters. “It’s The Sun what won it.” This is a bare faced statement that The Sun basically decides on their candidate of choice and voters go with that.
So it is when you depend on a so-called free press to give you the facts in nice, bite-sized form.
Absolutely agree. Until we restore a proper and trusted free press, all political bets are off. Americans are living in isolated bubbles of information with little agreement on actual ground truth.
I honestly feel like the media was covering Harris quite a lot. Her message needed to be more than "he's a fascist" and while some might say, she had a stronger message than that, as an educated person who consumes news from all sides of the spectrum, I didn't see it.
Edit: In fact, some say she lost the election because of her performance directly in front of the news media on TV and whatnot.
If this was the case then it seems that Harris would have won the race...the vast majority of the media I saw here in the US was going on and on about how Trump was a grave danger to democracy and in general just a terrible person and candidate. In regards to the media, I think this election shows that a large majority of the population simply does not believe them at all.
You don’t watch Fox News or listen to talk radio… it’s a nonstop drumbeat about how Kamala is a communist who will forcibly trans aborted prison babies. And “migrant crime” is up 10000000% and they’re lazy but also taking the jobs.
you're right I don't...but people that listen to that stuff were probably never going to vote for anyone other than Trump (anymore than listeners to MSNBC were going to stray from Harris). My primary sources are relatively centrist sources like WSJ and Economist as well as a variety of independent podcasts and the NYTimes. With a few exceptions on the podcast front all of these outlets were unabashedly anti-trump.
Do you argue that Trump was elected because the media supported him more than Harris? Although Fox News and X are fully pro-Trump, of course, my impression is that the majority of media did not support Trump. So, I find that media control thesis hard to believe.
Given how often the media would uncritically repeat upside-down nonsense like "Trump supporters say they're concerned with inflation" without any kind of analysis, yes, the overall media did tacitly support Trump.
I've no idea whether this was from the ownership class pulling strings to cut any real objective criticism of ZIRP corporate welfare, democrats uninterested in economics being blind to the fact that inflation actually has concrete causes, or from the writers having their brains steeped in things like racism-everywhere orthodoxy and thinking that referencing those narratives makes for a neutral objective article. But regardless of why, with friends like those...
While there is still more nuance to it than that, there is still truth. In the UK, one of Rupert Murdoch’s papers The Sun likes to boast about their political influence on voters. “It’s The Sun what won it.” This is a bare faced statement that The Sun basically decides on their candidate of choice and voters go with that.
So it is when you depend on a so-called free press to give you the facts in nice, bite-sized form.