#The media promised to do better after Trump’s win — instead, they got worse

The media tackled what was happening in the summer and fall of 2016 like the third-string of the New York Jets. They blew it. They whiffed. They could not conceive of a Donald Trump victory, and so they portrayed this event as a near-impossibility. To their credit, they admitted it, and they vowed to do better next time.

“If I have a mea culpa for journalists and journalism, it’s that we’ve got to do a much better job of being on the road, out in the country, talking to different kinds of people than the people we talk to … and remind ourselves that New York is not the real world,” New York Times editor Dean Baquet admitted after the election.

CNN’s Van Jones dubbed the world that the most vocal Democrats live in “the resistance bubble” and criticized Hillary Clinton’s failed election strategy. “It turns out, ‘You suck. Vote for me,’ is not a good slogan. It’s not a good bumper sticker,” he said on a podcast two years ago, while urging progressives to open their minds to alternative ideas. “We have to build up the capacity to hold a lot of different views,” he said. “I don’t have to say, ‘You are a bad person. You are a bigot. You are a sexist. You are a homophobe. Therefore, you must agree with me.’ ”

It sounded promising. But what did the media do after the dust settled and Trump geared up for reelection? Like a guy who comes out of rehab and heads straight for the nearest martini lounge, they relapsed. They couldn’t help themselves. They went back to putting 99 percent of their efforts into telling themselves a story they all believed: that Donald Trump was not just a horrible Republican president — aren’t they all? — but an actual threat to the Republic: Fifth Avenue Hitler, Benito Trumpolini, Orange-White nationalist. Virtually every national story they told the public ignored heartland concerns and came straight from the point of view of liberal Manhattan — Fantasy Island. To the media, Russia collusion is just about to be proven after four years of trying, Trump’s tweets matter more than Trump’s economy, and a pandemic that hit harder in Western Europe is all his fault.

Instead of focusing on real Americans who back the police, hate anarchists and don’t believe in forever lockdowns, the media dubbed arson and murder “mostly peaceful protests” (CNN). “Help me find Trump’s ‘anarchists’ in Portland,” echoed Nicholas Kristof of the Times, after two months of street demonstrations that included widespread vandalism, clashes between Antifa mobs and the police, and attacks on the city’s federal courthouse. The media mercilessly ridiculed red states for supposedly not taking the coronavirus seriously, and eight months into it, it’s still the blue states that have suffered by far the most casualties. (In the blue states, death rates per 100,000 residents are 40 percent higher than in red states, according to an AEI study. Of the first 210,000 deaths in the US from COVID-19, only 33,000 took place in red states.)

This week, even the most cynical observer of the media — that would be me — has to be dumbfounded at the next-level failure by most elite journalists to report on the volcanic explosion of Biden family scandals revealed by The Post’s blockbuster scoop last week. To date, Team Biden hasn’t refuted any aspect of the story, except a mealy-mouthed denial that there was a formal meeting between Joe Biden and Ukrainian energy exec Vadym Pozharskyi, though they admit there might have been an informal one. The media and their bros in Silicon Valley set to work burying the facts like mobsters in the woods, but true stories cannot be given the Jimmy Hoffa treatment. The Post’s traffic is through the roof, and Biden’s lead in top battlegrounds has softened. As other outlets expand upon and confirm The Post’s reporting, Democrats are sounding a lot less cocksure than they were two weeks ago.

Once, after getting it so wrong, the media vowed to reconnect with the people. Now their trick is to scream “disinformation” about any information inconvenient to the Bidens. Their new holy cause of dragging a confused old man across the finish line for the purpose of making America weak again will cost them a chunk of the very little trust they have left.

Kyle Smith is critic-at-large for National Review.