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And now, a glance backward to help inform how to proceed.
How did the media get this so wrong?
The media became a player — an antagonist — on the trail, thanks to Trump and, he would say, thanks to the media's coverage too. That may well have affected what people were saying to pollsters. Many states performed outside the margin of error of the projections.
Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight was off. The New York Times' Upshot was badly mistaken too. People relied on misinformation spread instantly on social media as well as the shoutfests and jabberjaw punditry on cable news.
And this occurred at the same time that unrelenting financial strains have hollowed out newsrooms across the country. Executives at News Corp., the New York Times Co., Gannett and tronc (formerly Tribune Publishing) have all reported deep declines in advertising revenues. Over time, reporters have only become more concentrated in Washington, D.C., and New York, as Nieman Lab's Joshua Benton wrote Wednesday.
The anti-Trump conservative columnist John Podhoretz, also the editor of Commentary magazine, mused on Twitter Wednesday that he might have to think about shutting down his social media account. "[T]he Twitter echo chamber created a din for many of us that made it impossible to hear what was happening," Podhoretz wrote.
It's "perhaps unhealthy for chattering classes (me included) to live partly within this 24-7 cocktail party that reinforces things that maybe shouldn't be reinforced and rewards facile conventional thinking rather than depth," Podhoretz continued. "Twitter is a bubble, or is a world of cliques."