The pundits most in need of self-reflection are opting instead to lash out at voters.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at the media’s continued failure to understand the American electorate after Election Day, and we cover more media misses.
Post-Election, The Media Still Haven’t Gotten the Message
Donald Trump’s overwhelming electoral win offered Democratic partisans in the press the opportunity to look in the mirror and figure out how they had missed voters’ brewing discontent. But by all appearances, the very pundits most in need of self-reflection have no intention of seizing that opportunity.
Trump improved his standing with the very groups his “hateful” rhetoric was supposed to alienate — younger voters, African Americans, Hispanics — exposing what passed for election analysis at the major corporate media outlets as wishful thinking.
In fact, Trump’s performance was the best for a Republican presidential candidate in exit poll history, according to CNN’s Harry Enten. “He literally goes all the way back through history and breaks history.”
Trump had Republicans’ best showing among 18- through 29-year-olds in 20 years. For black voters, it was the party’s best performance in 48 years. And he enjoyed support among Hispanic voters not seen for a Republican candidate in the entire existence of exit polling, which began in 1972.
Trump improved Republicans’ election performance in 49 states and Washington, D.C., over the 2020 election. With votes still outstanding, he could be the first Republican to win the popular vote since George W. Bush in 2004.
Rather than grappling with how they themselves may have contributed to this reality, or at least failed to pick up on it until it was thrust into their faces, the most committed partisans in the mainstream press apparently plan to wag their fingers at American voters for the next four years.
One radio journalist who spoke to Brian Stelter was so close to getting the point: It is “hard not to see this election as just a national repudiation of what we do. We spent four years reporting so aggressively” on election denialism and the fallout from January 6 – and many voters evidently didn’t care.
But instead of refocusing their reporting to be more in line with voter concerns, progressive pundits and their counterparts in the Never-Trump media space are returning to their well-worn 2016 playbook.
The New York Times editorial board dubbed Trump’s victory a “grave threat to the republic.”
“American voters have made the choice to return Donald Trump to the White House, setting the nation on a precarious course that no one can fully foresee,” the board wrote one day after Election Day.
That tone carried on throughout the outlet’s “news analysis.”
“Trump asked for power. Voters said yes,” the Times reported.
“This was a conquering of the nation not by force but with a permission slip. Now, America stands on the precipice of an authoritarian style of governance never before seen in its 248-year history,” it added.
Scientific American editor in chief Laura Helmuth was hardly looking to bring her fellow Americans with differing views into the fold. “Solidarity to everybody whose meanest, dumbest, most bigoted high-school classmates are celebrating early results because f— them to the moon and back,” she wrote in a post on Bluesky.
“I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of f***ing fascists,” she added in a separate post. She also shared a Scientific American article about “election grief,” which the outlet declared “is real” and offered readers advice on “how to cope.”
MSNBC gave airtime to a Yale University psychiatrist who said it’s completely normal and even good to cut ties with relatives who voted for Trump.
“So, if you are going into a situation where you have family members, where you have close friends who you know have voted in ways that are against you . . . it’s completely fine to not be around those people and to tell them why,” Yale University chief psychiatry resident Dr. Amanda Calhoun told Joy Reid on Friday.
“You know, to say, ‘I have a problem with the way that you voted because it went against my very livelihood, and I’m not going to be around you this holiday. I need to take some space for me,’” she said.
Taking a cue from the hysterical MAGA supporters who insisted that a Trump loss this cycle would spell the end of the American experiment, left-wing pundits are now predicting that Trump will use the machinery of state to ensure that Americans never cast a meaningful vote again.
“The first thing MAGA will do is dismantle the apparatus necessary for anybody to mount a serious challenge against them again. There will be an ‘election’ in ’28, but it will be perfunctory. We are a one-party state now,” The Nation’s Elie Mystal wrote in a recent diatribe.
And the fascism argument wasn’t unique to the center-left media.
For The Dispatch, Nick Catoggio, who formerly wrote under the pseudonym “Allahpundit,” offered a cruel, unyielding rebuke of his fellow Americans who supported the president-elect and said they deserve all the bad that may be coming to them.
“Trump’s voters broke America and deserve to get what they’ve bought, economically, politically, and morally,” Catoggio writes. “I was right about the rottenness of the electorate and I’ll be right, in spades, about the rottenness of Trump’s abuses in a second term. And when millions of our friends and neighbors decide they don’t care how abusive he’s being so long as he’s hurting the right people, I’ll remind everyone who’s scolded me for assuming the worst about our wonderful fellow Americans that I was right about that too. If you’ve been dismayed by what Trump voters have been willing to condone in the past, get ready. You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
While some pundits focused on the apocalyptic future, others looked back, trying — and failing — to make sense of the election outcome.
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough suggested that Trump won because of the sexism and racism of Latino Americans and the sexism of black Americans.
CNN anchor Jim Acosta chastised Latino voters who supported Trump, telling them they had voted “against their own self-interests” because of Trump’s promises to deport millions of illegal immigrants from the country. Acosta apparently could not fathom that many of these Latinos are living here legally and do not prioritize the needs of those who are not.
“A lot of folks are wondering why Latinos would vote for Donald Trump if that means he would deport abuela, he might deport other members of their household?” Acosta said Thursday. “A lot of folks are asking on the Democratic side, why would they do this to themselves?”
He even told Luis Figueroa, vice chairman for the Republican National Hispanic Assembly, that he had voted to “round up” Latinos and put them in camps.
Meanwhile, some Democrats had the sense to see that their increasingly radical stance on culture-war issues had led, at least in part, to their loss. Representative Seth Moulton (D., Mass.) cited identity politics as a contributing factor to his party’s electoral struggles this cycle as he acknowledged that he wouldn’t want men playing sports with his own daughters, but that he’s not allowed to say that as a Democrat.
“I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete,” Moulton told New York Times reporter Reid Epstein. “But as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
Representative Tom Suozzi (D., N.Y.) came to a similar conclusion, saying that Democrats who won on Election Day did so by distancing themselves from the party’s radical positions on social issues.
But over on CNN, talking about the issue got commentator Shermichael Singleton berated for using a slur — even when he didn’t. “I think there are a lot of families out there who don’t believe boys should play girls’ sports,” Singleton said.
“They’re not boys,” author Jay Michaelson interrupted. “I’m not going to listen to transphobia at this table.”
“When you use a word that’s a slur, I’m going to interrupt!” Michaelson added. “They’re not boys. They’re not playing girls’ softball. I’m not going to sit there and listen to that.”
“I know that you are not intending to be transphobic,” CNN anchor Abby Phillip told Singleton.
Headline Fail of the Week
We’ve been told that Trump’s election ushers in a new era of fascism in the U.S. and marks the single greatest threat to democracy the country has ever faced. And yet, Democrats who have been sounding the alarm over this for years are apparently too tired to do anything about it.
“Resist or Retreat? Democratic Voters Are Torn About Whether to Keep Fighting,” reads a new headline from the New York Times.
“Many who became activists during the first Trump administration are questioning if they can summon the strength to do it all over again,” a subheading explains.
Media Misses
• ABC, CBS, and NBC displayed an unprecedented level of political bias this campaign cycle, according to a new study from the Media Research Center. The conservative-leaning media watchdog group tallied the number of value-laden statements made about each candidate by news anchors, reporters, and expert subjects over the course of the presidential race and found coverage of Harris was 78 percent positive, compared with Trump’s 15 percent positive coverage.
• Kamala Harris’s former communications director, Jamal Simmons, says President Biden should step down before the end of his term to allow Harris to serve as the first female president. His comments left his fellow CNN panelists stunned. Host Dana Bash remarked that the idea had “jumped from an internet meme to a Sunday morning show,” while commentator Scott Jennings said, “Jamal’s out here writing a season of House of Cards.”
• The New Republic says it was the right-wing media that won Trump the election by misleading voters about the strength of the economy. “It wasn’t the economy,” Michael Tomasky wrote. “It wasn’t inflation, or anything else. It was how people perceive those things, which points to one overpowering answer” — the right-wing media.