Big shock?: Election results being broadcast on news tickers in Times Square, New York, last Tuesday night. — ©2024 The New York Times Company
IT’S a repeat of what happened in 2016. Then, the United States media predicted – wrongly – that Donald Trump would lose the presidential election. Trump went on to beat Hilary Clinton, the Democrat candidate.
The US media, particularly CNN and the other national media in the country, were caught flat-footed.
Fast forward to 2024 and history has repeated itself.
The same US media, which the world relied on for information, convinced us that it would be a neck-and-neck contest between Democrat contender Kamala Harris and Trump.
Even until election day, the world was told that it was an election that would be too close to call. They were so wrong.
In the end, Trump won convincingly and decisively, and Harris was left far behind with the US map almost completely covered in red, the colour of the Republicans.
The Republicans have captured the Senate while the fight continues for the House of Representatives, which has become another cliffhanger.
CNN continuously painted Trump as a politician who constantly lied and shamelessly heaped insults on his opponent.
He was made out to be an unstable person who was not fit to run the world’s most powerful country. In short, he was a danger and the voters shouldn’t gamble on him.
Voters were reminded that Trump was a felon with more charges coming up.
It didn’t work. The powerful media wasn’t covering the polls – it was actively campaigning for Harris.
It would appear that the media was not listening hard enough to the people. It missed the heartbeat of the nation, especially those struggling in their daily lives.
The economy is what matters most for the working class.
Why would they care if Taylor Swift, Jennifer Lopez or Beyonce, multimillionaires in Hollywood, decided to endorse Harris?
The biggest surprise has been the reports that black working class people and youths were going to vote for Trump, which had been early red flags.
These were ordinary workers having a hard time putting food on the table and paying the bills, or even just finding jobs.
Trump’s final message was simple – Americans don’t have to live this way. It was a message that must have resonated with the voters.
So what happened in 2016 when Trump won and the media lost?
“The distance between the nation’s political press corps and its people has never seemed so stark.
“The pundits swung and missed. The polls failed,” journalist David Folkenflik wrote at npr.org then.
He said the nation’s journalists “have come off as petty, grasping, and out of touch, all part of the great establishment party from which many Trump voters felt excluded.”
The reality is that most of the US media’s national offices are in Washington DC, New York City, and Los Angeles.
It is not wrong, as the powers-that-be are concentrated in these cities, plus their mostly urban audiences also live there.
But like most media – including those in Malaysia – they neglect the voices of the heartland.
In the United States, the national media – including the so-called experts, analysts, and pollsters – again ignored the sentiments of the mid-West.
The media only spoke to politicians, who were supposedly informed and reliable, but not the real voters, especially in the farmlands.
Worse, such voters were often written off as rural, ill-informed simpletons, as voters “with no college degrees” in surveys, or perceived as people who cannot make correct political decisions.
This time, the Republicans even won many urban votes, which stunned the Democrats.
Judging from the tone of the US media this time around, none of them learned from the fiasco of 2016.
In 2016, the defeated Clinton called supporters of Trump “a basket of deplorables” and in 2024, president Joe Biden dismissed them as “garbage”.
The Malaysian media, too, has had its share of misses. Most of us, including this writer, didn’t see Barisan Nasional’s defeat coming in the 2018 general elections.
We didn’t listen hard enough and our credibility took a beating.
Like the US media, the mainstream media no longer has a monopoly on news.
But news portals and podcasts are not viable options either, as they are often tainted with the suspicion that they are politically financed.
The lesson to learn from the US election is that the economy matters the most.
When the voices of the working people are ignored, the populists and right wingers will fill the gap. For Malaysia, the thoughts of religious-based politicians winning is more frightening.
What is clear is that voters will not tolerate condescending politicians who talk down to the very people who elected them into office.
