When Americans woke up on the morning of November 9—many bleary, from having stayed up past our bedtimes with Steve Kornacki—news alerts and inboxes were stuffed with similar-sounding reports, that a “red wave” had failed to appear, defying expectations. The exact source of those expectations was not directly stated—though some articles linked back to claims made recently in stories published by their own outlets. (“The looming election disaster” was the headline of a days-earlier Politico piece, which envisioned days, weeks, “perhaps even months” of chaos.) Kyle Pope, the editor and publisher of CJR, sensed that yet another election-prediction failure would do little to improve the public’s waning trust in the press. “This had been another big media fail,” he said, on the latest episode of The Kicker. “The ‘red wave,’ the election system was going to be threatened, the very functioning of democracy was at risk—none of that materialized.” It seemed, to him, a mirror of what had happened in 2016: “Basically a miscall.”
Seeking answers, he turned to Ross Barkan, who covers politics for New York magazine, The Nation, and elsewhere. “People who were watching and listening to media in the run-up to this race are rightly going to feel that they were not getting an accurate picture of what was actually going on based on the election results,” Pope said. Barkan’s reply: “I think that’s an argument for the media trying to not be so predictive. There’s not really that great a value in guessing.”
Sure, polls had shown that, in a lot of key races, Democrats were in danger, Barkan pointed out. (Even in exit polls, Joe Biden had a low favorability rating, of just 41 percent.) And yet: “The future is a lot murkier than it looks.” After the fact, Barkan observed that the midterms showed the enduring strength of tabloid media and local nightly-news broadcasts—which tend to be underrated by press-and-politics watchers, he said, who “don’t quite always see the audiences they have built in and the way their coverage does shape, sometimes, political narratives.” In his view, “broadcast outlets take their cues from tabloid media” on everything from campaigns to crime.
To get a grip on reality, looking beyond Twitter—“You can get very cloistered there,” Barkan said—is a good start, as is talking to anyone who isn’t a professional journalist. “Diversify your social circle,” he said. “People in the media are shocked to find that ordinary people just hold views that are not in line with stereotypes.” Best of all, go out and report: “There’s no single form that’s going to unlock all truth, right? I think truth will come down to reporters who are seeking it, who are telling it, and who are really trying to just interrogate their own blind spots.” —Betsy Morais, managing editor
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