| | | | | Many questions, few answers | | Twenty four hours after one of the biggest media failures in a generation, I have a lot of questions:
What do readers and viewers need right now? What should change about journalism in the weeks and months to come? What must NOT change?
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How can journalists help bridge our national divide rather than deepen it? How much influence do we really have, anyway?
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Was the election of Donald Trump a repudiation of the national media as well as other "elites?" If so, will the message be received?
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How many "media elites" can honestly say they know Trump voters personally?
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How many times have you asked yourself, today, "How does the other side feel?"
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Wednesday's protests are an opportunity for Trump. Will he rise to the occasion? Should he address the nation?
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Did Wednesday's news coverage fully capture the fear that half the country is feeling? Conversely, were there too many cameras at Wednesday's night's anti-Trump protests, and too few cameras in the communities where voters are feeling newfound hope and optimism?
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How will Trump's anti-media rhetoric translate to his administration? Will he target individual journalists? Will he withhold press credentials? Will he seek to loosen libel laws? | | Why did most of us head into Tuesday night believing Hillary Clinton would win? That it wouldn't even be close in the electoral college? That it might be called by midnight?How much of this was just a genuine mistake based on gnarly polls, how much of it was groupthink, how much of it was wishful thinking? What are the best remedies for "Acela corridor bias?"
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What are the specific reasons why so many polls underestimated Trump's support? How long will it take to unpack this? What changes will be implemented?
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Fact-checking myself: Was 2016 really the year of the fact-checker? Did it matter much at all? Did newspaper investigations matter? Did editorials matter? Did the debates matter?
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How did the gutting of local newsrooms affect the coverage of this race, particularly in the red states that determined the outcome?
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What role did misinformation and "fake news" have on the outcome? Will Facebook do some soul-searching? | | How much cable news did Trump watch today? What did he learn from the coverage?
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This one is from David Gergen on "CNN Tonight:" "Were we enablers of Donald Trump? Were we too negative toward him?"
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Trust in media is already at pitifully low levels among Republicans. How much will it decline among Democrats who now blame the media for Trump's victory?
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This one is from my wife Jamie: "Are you going to have the same people bloviate day in and day out?"
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This one is from Scott Pelley on Wednesday's "CBS Evening News:" "Are we going to be OK?"
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Is the mainstreaming of alt-right media already underway? What are the consequences?
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Will newsrooms rethink how much air time and ink was spent covering polls? Will the lessons be taken to heart? Or will the same mistakes be repeated four years from now?
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Will candidates spend less $$$ on TV ads in the future? How will this affect television stations and networks?
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This one is from Dylan Byers: "What is the guiding principle for news organizations in the Trump era? Do they want to challenge him when he goes against their notions of acceptable governance, or simply provide a record of his actions and behavior?"
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What new media outlets will rise from these ashes? What will make these startups different from what exists today?
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This one is via Andrew Beaujon's Twitter feed: "Is there any way that the next four years do not become a reporting bonanza for the ages?"
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I'm sure you have even more Q's. Email them to our team: reliablesources@cnn.com | | | "Get up and get back to work" | | | Read what Poynter's Kelly McBride wrote to journalists here: "The country has elected a candidate who was more untruthful than his rivals and who successfully projected that same criticism onto his opponent and onto the media who repeatedly called him out. Half the country is not interested in factual arguments you thought they would be interested in. If you believe in the truth, there's only one response: Get up and get back to work." | | Dylan Byers emails from Philadelphia: There are at least a dozen studies that could be written on the media's role in the 2016 election, but this, to me, is the salient point: Many people in the media, myself included, did not spend enough time looking at developments in the campaign through the lens of disenfranchised Americans.
We often took stock of the fact that many Americans were frustrated and angry at Washington, but did not consider how these people might view Donald Trump's statements and behavior. We chose to see his more radical remarks as major controversies without adequately assessing how they might be viewed by people who are far more concerned with their quality of life or their economic well-being than with deliberating whether or not something was sexist, racist, demagogic or politically correct.
The view on 2016 was largely seen through the prism of progressive, cosmopolitan values, and only rarely through the lens of the conservative populists who carried Trump to victory. It was a blind spot. | | | Remember what Steve Bannon said... | | | When Dylan Byers texted Steve Bannon on Tuesday morning, to ask about Breitbart and other conservative media outlets laying the groundwork for Trump's loss, Bannon replied: "We r not losing." | | | Time for a "real reckoning" about polling | | Data journalism is "under fire," NYT's Jim Rutenberg writes in his Thursday column.
Rutenberg and the WSJ's Joe Flint both spoke with CBS News prez David Rhodes, who told Flint: "There's no question the polling was off. It wasn't capturing support for Trump. Is there a real reckoning for some of this polling and voluminous analysis that suggest this is her race to lose? Absolutely there is."
More: "Rhodes said early on Tuesday night there was some evidence that supporters of Mr. Trump were under-indexing in exit polls, possibly because they were rebuffing poll takers' questions. 'If that was true in the exit polls you have to ask if that was true in other surveys as well,' he said..." | | | Here's what Nate Silver says | | Nate Silver told me "there's a lot of misinterpretation out there" about the polling failure. "The national polls are going to wind up having done a fairly good job." The state polls, however, were "much more of a mess."
"I think it's pretty irresponsible for people to blame the polls, though, when the conventional wisdom was so much more sure of itself than it should have been," Silver says. "We got a *lot* of crap for pointing out that the polls showed a fairly close election and that a fairly ordinary polling error could shift the Electoral College to Trump. People just didn't want to hear it." | | | That's the quote of the day: "People just didn't want to hear it." | | | Record cable news ratings on election night | | "CNN had the night's largest audience with 13.3 million primetime viewers, according to Nielsen," Frank Pallotta reports. "This number was up 43% from election night in 2012" -- making it CNN's most-watched election ever. "Coming in behind CNN was Fox News, which brought in 12.1 million viewers and MSNBC, which brought in 5.9 million viewers Tuesday night." As Trump's victory looked more and more likely, Fox viewers stayed awake later...
-- More: Both CNN and Fox topped NBC, which had the largest broadcast audience, 11.1 million. ABC came in second place while CBS nabbed third." Read more... | | | What is Ailes thinking today? | | | Brian Lowry's latest column: Through Fox News, Roger Ailes became a Republican kingmaker, and fostered conditions that helped make Trump's election possible. But irony of ironies, he wasn't there when the GOP candidate crossed the finish line, brought down by sexual-misconduct allegations, which Trump's campaign survived... | | | My two cents about the next four years | | The Trump campaign's constant media attacks are a cloud that will hover over the next four years. For example: a Trump administration might not try to revoke anyone's press credentials or ban anyone from events. But everyone in the press corps will know that Trump did so during the campaign. He might not smear and demean any individual journalists. But everyone will remember what he said about Megyn Kelly and Katy Tur and some of my colleagues at CNN. I'm concerned about potential chilling effects.
Covering this new administration, journalists will need to hold Trump accountable; tell uncomfortable truths; stand up to threats to our profession; and have newfound humility in our approach to the audience... | | | Will Trump block the AT&T-Time Warner deal? | | | Analysts say that Trump's election casts immediate doubt on AT&T's acquisition of Time Warner, the parent company of CNN. Remember, Trump vowed in late October that his administration would block the transaction. While he hasn't repeated the threat since then -- it may have just been a stray comment made in the context of his anger about CNN's coverage of his campaign -- it is enough for Wall Street analysts to raise alarms. BTIG analyst Rich Greenfield says "the Trump Presidency adds to the risk surrounding regulatory approval." Here's my full story... | | | On "CNN Tonight," Ana Navarro said Trump "should call up the Spanish networks." I wrote on Tuesday about how Trump never gave an interview to Jorge Ramos or any other national Spanish language TV interviewer... | | | Newsrooms as "the loyal opposition" | | | Daily Beast EIC John Avlon writes: "We will count ourselves members of the loyal opposition—loyal to the United States of America and opposed to the policies proposed by the president-elect during his campaign. And we will reflect on what has led so many of our fellow Americans to embrace such a messenger." More... | | | Let "reporting take precedent over opinion" | | | CJR editor/publisher Kyle Pope writes: "Too often, the views of Trump's followers—which is to say, the people who just elected our next president—were dismissed entirely by an establishment media whose worldview is so different, and so counter, to theirs that it became chic to belittle them and wave them off. Reporters' personal views got in the way of their ability to hear what was happening around them. Now a new era needs to begin, a period in which reporting takes precedent over opinion, when journalists are willing to seek out and understand people with whom they may have profound personal and philosophical differences." Read more... | | "The media are so, so far removed from their country. The gaps have gotten so large. The media are all in Washington, D.C., and New York now thanks to the decline of local and metro papers. And the gaps between how those cities and the rest of the country are doing have gotten so much larger in recent years." --Alec MacGillis to Dylan Byers... | | | Nathan McDermott of CNN's KFILE tweets: "Last month People published a piece by one of their writers about how Trump sexually assaulted her. Here's next week's cover." His hashtag: #TimeFlies | | | Trump's most-retweeted comment ever | | | It's what he posted at 6:36am Wednesday: "Such a beautiful and important evening! The forgotten man and woman will never be forgotten again. We will all come together as never before" | | | Four more years of Baldwin? | | | Things you don't normally hear on late night TV | | Seth Meyers on Wednesday night's "Late Night" on NBC: "Donald Trump made a lot of promises as to what he's going to do in the next four years, and now we get to see if he can fulfill them. And so, I'd just like to make one promise to him: We here at Late Night will be watching you." | | | Stay up late/wake up early... | | | CNN's nonstop live coverage is, well, not stopping. I'll be joining Poppy Harlow at 1 and 2am ET... and Bill Carter and I will be on "New Day" in the 5am hour... | | | What do you like about this newsletter? What do you dislike? Send your feedback to reliablesources@cnn.com. We appreciate every email... And we'll be back tomorrow with another special edition... | | | Get Reliable Sources, a comprehensive summary of the most important media news, delivered to your inbox every afternoon. | | | | | |
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