
Ask HN: Trump is winning. Is US media to blame? - piyushpr134
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 ?
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rorykoehler
The failure of neoliberalism to widely distribute the gains from increased
productivity/globalisation is to blame.

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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...

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lumberjack
Nobody is denying that. It's just completely irrelevant to the discussion.

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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.

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tlack
They're to blame for misrepresenting the will of the populace, it seems

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gragas
Smug liberalism lost. Finally.

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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

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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.

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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..

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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.

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Fricken
The media gets it's orders from the viewing public. It feeds us whatever we're
hungry for.

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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.

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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!'

