He didn’t win because he spent the most money; Hillary’s spending dwarfed his. He didn’t win because he was the best campaigner; his speeches were often disjointed and contradictory. He won because voters, particularly in the Midwest, believed in whatever version of Donald Trump mattered to them the most. And no one in the media saw it coming.
That’s a major problem for journalists in the age of social media, where connecting with your audience, even tangentially, matters.
It also matters when reporters are supposed to report on what is happening. The 2016 election was the equivalent of missing a tsunami – the ground shook when he won the nomination, the alarms were going off as he remained close in the polls, and still they were all wet on election day. And they’ve been mad as a cat after a bath since.
That brings us to the other part of Bannon’s quote, the part the media doesn’t want to talk about. “The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut,” he said. And while most headlines stopped there, Bannon did not. He continued with, “and just listen for a while.”
It wasn’t a new sentence. It was the same sentence, though you wouldn’t know it from any of the headlines, tweets or talking heads who clutched their pearls over someone in the White House telling the media to “keep its mouth shut.”
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