If anyone aside from Hillary herself woke up the morning after election day in utter shock, it had to be the fearless purveyors of propaganda known as the news media, who suddenly realized in a state of utter shock: No one listens to us.
And it's true. The most amazing thing about Tuesday's Trump victory is that it came amidst a total media blitzkrieg against the man.
Abandon the normal practice of objectivity...
And we're not just talking here about the usual liberal bias in the media, nor even about a somewhat heightened level of bias. We're talking about extraordinary measures the media made no effort to hide.
We can start with a front-page op-ed written Aug. 7 in the New York Times by Jim Rutenberg, in which he openly called on journalists to abandon the normal practice of objectivity and become openly oppositional in their coverage of Trump. As if they needed the encouragement. They didn't, of course, but they don't usually admit on the front page of the New York Times that this is what they're doing.
Then we come to publications like USA Today and The Atlantic, which don't typically do presidential endorsements, but this year made special exceptions because the dire emergency of defeating Trump was so important. And it wasn't just that they wrote endorsements. They also went on with overhyped grandeur about the historic nature of their doing so.
There were other things.
If you think back to December, you will recall that Trump's proposal to halt immigration from Muslim countries "until we can figure out what's going on" inspired apoplectic seizures in newsrooms. The Detroit Free Press took the extraordinary step (and they wanted you to know it was extraordinary) of publishing a front-page editorial denouncing Trump, titled in typical Free Press fashion, "We stand together. We are better than bigotry."
Media debate moderators treated Trump as if they, not Hillary, were his debate opponents
And on and on and on it went. Network morning shows endlessly bashing Trump, claiming he would somehow end the republic by refusing to concede defeat after the election. (As of this writing, Trump still hasn't conceded defeat. Maybe they were onto something.) Pundits hyperventilating because Trump asked questions to advisors about the use of nuclear weapons.
Much was made of the fact that Trump received almost no newspaper endorsements, and that even historically Republican-leaning editorial pages like the Detroit News and the Dallas Morning News either backed Hillary or went third-party as a protest against Trump.
Media debate moderators treated Trump as if they, not Hillary, were his debate opponents.
And of course, when Trump himself really did provide them with useful material - like the Access Hollywood tape - they shut down virtually all other news reporting for days on end to talk about it endlessly.
The media really seemed to believe that if they made their case relentlessly enough, the voters might respond by giving Hillary a 50-state sweep and 538 electoral votes as her ticket to the presidency.
It turned out none of it mattered. The media apparently have no influence whatsoever.
Fall of the house of Clinton
The devastated New York Times declared the result a "humbling blow to the news media," and not just because they failed to see it coming. It was much worse than that. They did everything but cut off their own right arms to instruct Americans that under no circumstances were they to vote for Donald Trump. Americans responded with a right-arm gesture of their own.
Rob wrote in September about a Gallup study that shows Americans' trust in the media is at the lowest point it's ever been. Is it any wonder why? Anyone could see what was going on in this campaign. Trump clearly had his issues, but the way the media tried to whitewash Hillary's problems was simply stunning. They were putting forth a candidate awash in corruption and dishonesty, and with no clear rationale for why she should be president, and trying as hard as they could to shove her down our throats despite all the glaring reasons it would be foolhardy to hand such a person the power of the presidency.
The harder they tried to tell us Trump must not win, and the harder they tried to tell us Trump could not win, the more voters seemed to tune them out entirely.
And that may be the best result of this race aside from the fact that a Hillary presidency was blessedly prevented. When we talk around here about the political class and its inclination to try to dictate directions to the general public, it needs to be understood that the establishment media are part of that political class. For all their talk about how they "hold leaders accountable" and so forth, they generally cheerlead for the same basic assumptions elected officials and those in the administrative state make about government and life.
In this election, the political class saw the state of the nation one way, and the voters saw it a very different way. And unlike in past elections, the voters were able to see clearly how the media were trying to manipulate them - if only because the manipulation abandoned all sense of shame or subtlety. People were being told what to do. And it was obvious. And the people were having none of it.
I suspect the media's treatment of President Trump will be adversarial in way that will put their treatment of George W. Bush to shame, which will be really something. When it's warranted, that's fine. But chances are it will be all the time, warranted or not, and the public is now wise to it in a way they have really not been in the past.
If this election signals the decline of the mainstream media's influence on the public, we may have gotten a result out of Tuesday that's even more beneficial in the long term than the fall of the house of Clinton.
