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Ask HN: Trump is winning. Is US media to blame?

12 points by piyushpr134 ↗ HN
Trump is winning. Is US media to blame ? Has this media become shallow and corrupt which has led to this ? People who are marginalised have no voice and media does not care about them. Homeless people sleeping on streets who are not cared for by the powerful state, the people who feel threatened by illegal immigrants in their own country, people who hate to see violent crimes on street by criminals...have they spoken ?

16 comments

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tlack
They're to blame for misrepresenting the will of the populace, it seems
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rorykoehler
The failure of neoliberalism to widely distribute the gains from increased productivity/globalisation is to blame.
moyta
Too true, then to top it off the right to protest has been sharply curtailed and policed, preventing mass protests esque MLK, Silent Spring, etc.

To top it all off, the media essentially created a candidate that would rile people up, then disowned him which only made people want to vote for him more. TrumpLand covers this very well.

On the other side of the aisle, we had a very weak candidate running against what was a media troll, with vast amounts of funding that didn't end up translating into a great ground game. I remember when Bernie was running he would have his supporters call every phone number in certain states, and get people out hitting the streets and asking for your vote. I saw very little of that from Hillary.

runamok
Hasn't it though?

I mean the decline of the US manufacturing sector has led to an emerging middle class in many other countries. Clearly most of the wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few but there has definitely been a reversion to the mean globally where the average worker on earth is doing better and the average worker in the US is doing the same or worse...

rorykoehler
Pretty good for asia but not for the rust belt that Trump rode into the white house.
lumberjack
Nobody is denying that. It's just completely irrelevant to the discussion.
Fricken
The media gets it's orders from the viewing public. It feeds us whatever we're hungry for.
wfo
I think this is overly simplistic; the media both follows the most base desires of the populace to seek advertising dollars and also shapes the narrative. There's a lot of back and forth there. We don't know what we want, the media tells us what we should want, and then we want it.

The media certainly propped up Trump quite a bit starting from the primaries (preferring to show empty Trump podiums instead of other candidates, for example), it's the wholesale merge of news and entertainment that's the reason why, because he's both at the same time.

Fricken
Viewers stop changing the channel when Trump is on screen. That's all there is to that.

When the media spins something up into a narrative, they're just grabbing those narrative devices out of a hat full of tricks that have worked in the past to engage viewers.

I've got 15 years working in media. There's no conspiracy, it's just run of the mill shameless opportunism. 'Look at that, they're eating this shit up, feed them more!'

gragas
Smug liberalism lost. Finally.
murukesh_s
No. Media is always left leaning liberal. And they always picks favourites and bend data to show that their side will win. In most pre-polls, the average white American, which I believe is the majority backed Trump. But yet the media favoured Hillary. It's not their fault, but they couldn't just sense the ground reality..
rurban
Partially the media is to blame and partially the DNC. They thought they will fare better Clinton than Sanders, even if the voters had other ideas.
joeclark77
The media think they influence the election results, but in this case it didn't really happen. Both parties' nominees won their nominations by significant margins. Trump won the general election despite the media being united against him. The media are now asking themselves "What could we have done to prevent this?" (See for example Chuck Todd's article at NBCnews.com yesterday, appointing partial "blame" for the outcome to the media.) This misses the point. The media shouldn't be trying to influence the outcome, except in a couple of ways: they should make it their mission that people be as informed as possible, and that that information be true. Their loyalty to a left-wing political ideology has come before both of those things, which is why their credibility is in the dumps.
NumberCruncher
The media is making money by manipulating the masses. Blaming the media for mass manipulation is like blaming a dog for behaving like a dog.
totony
Your shilling leaks. I am low key relieved Trump won, hopefully our relations with russia will imptove and we can prevent the next nuclear winter