The Election Demands a Reckoning
As America holds its breath to hear the final results of the 2020 presidential election (which will hopefully be revealed before all oxygen to the brain is lost), and as serious concerns are raised about potential election fraud, one important observation that can be made about the results thus far is, whatever the outcome, the race is clearly very close. Given the strong leftward bias of the national press, and given the now-disgraced polls that many mainstream media outlets published prior to Election Day, this fact ought to provoke a reckoning on the political left.
Indeed, even if Joe Biden wins, the fact that this race is so close should knock the wind out of the Democrats, the Democratic media, and the Democratic big tech companies — and, moreover, should knock them off of their high horses. These are the United States’ major sources of information, and they have often tried to manipulate the masses, have relentlessly opposed President Trump, and have even suppressed bad news about Biden, yet they still couldn’t manage to make the votes for Biden pull out well ahead of Trump, nor to secure significant gains in the Senate and House. Apparently more people see through their manipulation efforts than both they and perhaps many on the right expected.
Moreover, as rightwing media have pointed out, support for Trump from minority voters has greatly increased from 2016 — which likewise indicates the relative ineffectiveness of the mainstream news media’s and big tech companies’s efforts to convince people either of Trump’s and the Republicans’ alleged bigotry or of Biden’s and the Democrats’ progressive agenda, and which points to the possibility for Republicans to continue expanding and diversifying their coalition.
If the Democrats and their propagandists hoped this election would be a resounding rebuke of Trump, it is not; it is a well-deserved resounding rebuke of them. Will they learn their lesson? Doubtful. If the track record says anything, the people in these institutions have convinced themselves of the virtue of what now looks to be a losing strategy: to demonize the right with straw-man accusations of racism and to persist in pushing leftward in their philosophy and policy proposals. Fortunately, if the election results are any indication, they don’t have as much of a monopoly on the Overton window as many have assumed, despite their current (and terrifying) grapple on the flow of information — news, technology, and even academia.
Some in the mainstream media have at least acknowledged their failure to account for the size of the rightwing contingent in America. As Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times David Brooks tweeted on Wednesday, “Our job in the media is to capture reality so that when reality voices itself, like last night, people aren’t surprised. Pretty massive failure. We still are not good at capturing the rightward half of the country.”
This is an important admission, though it doesn’t go far enough; the failure is not merely a failure to account for and accurately represent the rightwing half of the country, but is also the moral failure of the intentional deception and manipulation by which they have maintained and tried to facilitate the growth of the leftwing half. They have not been merely trying to “capture reality”; they have been trying to influence reality with bad ideas and through unethical means.
Still, acknowledgements like Brooks’s would be the first step in the right direction, if there were more steps to follow. The question to him and to all of the mainstream media is, what are you going to do about it?
I don’t expect a decent answer.