Why The Media Missed The 'Trump Story'

In the daily Reliable Sources email newsletter that is sent out by CNN, host Brian Stelter offered up this question to readers on Wednesday:

In planning this Sunday's televised edition of "Reliable Sources," I've been honing in on some questions about Donald Trump and the ways the press has covered his campaign since last summer. I'm not talking about the quantity of coverage right now... That's been debated on the show many times... Instead, I'm talking about the quality. Did too many individual journalists and their institutions miss or dismiss Trump and his voters? If so, what's this "disconnect" about? Are there lasting effects?

The question of "How did we misjudge the rise of Donald Trump?" really has two related, but nonetheless separate parts with very different answers.

If you're talking specifically about Donald Trump, he was able to take advantage of several factors unique to him and his candidacy. Unlike nearly every other Presidential hopeful, Donald Trump had enough personal wealth to fund his campaign in the early months. A move which sheltered him from the typical financial pressures faced by most candidates. And that self-funding also allowed him to ignore complaints from GOP officials and potential donors. He didn't need their money and that is typically the way most candidates are kept in check by the party establishment.

And after a couple of decades tussling with the New York press, Donald Trump understood the imperatives of the media, particularly the cable news networks. Trump's propensity to just spew out whatever popped into his head combined with his willingness to call into any news program that would answer their phone made him irresistible to networks. He knew they couldn't resist a story compelling enough to fill a news cycle or two of panel segments. Trump also doesn't ever admit he's wrong, which tended to make even the smallest misstep a multi-day news bonanza.

But the candidacy of Donald Trump also benefited from a decision Fox News Channel made early on about the structure of the presidential primary debates. Faced with an unwieldy field of 16 candidates, the network could have decided to simply randomly assign candidates to one of two debates. But because Fox and the GOP were trying to tilt the playing field towards the establishment candidates, they opted to use polling data to assign the most "popular" candidates to the main debate stage. The assumption was that party favorites such as Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Scott Walker would be most likely to make the main stage and the other less-favored candidates would be less likely to gain traction. Forcing a candidate struggling in the polls to remain in the second tier debate would cripple them further and within a couple of months, the race would come down to one of a smaller group of establishment favorites.

Donald Trump took advantage of a couple of flaws in that plan. Early polls are traditionally unreliable and the results tend to reflect name recognition and "heat." Trump's ability to carpet-bomb the political press ensured he got attention and he was also able to leverage existing business relationships (like the one with NBC) to book crucial attention-getting stunts like hosting Saturday Night Live. And at some point, that attention became a loop of growing influence in the race. The more attention Trump received, the better his poll numbers and the more attention he received. It was a perfect storm of political self-absorption and the inclination of overworked media to cover the flashiest story.

While all of this was one of the reasons for the rise of Donald Trump, the second cause is a reflection of the disconnect between the establishment political/media class and the viewers/voters they supposedly represent. Trump's success has been driven in part by voters anger towards the powers that be. While the specific issues are different, it's also the same dynamic that has boosted the campaign of Bernie Sanders. Voters feel powerless and are furious about what they see as a primarily East Coast elite that wouldn't know a grocery coupon if it poked them in their well-connected eye.

It's not as if this anger is coming out of nowhere. It's the same visceral fear and passion that helped boost the candidacy of Barack Obama in 2008 and the Tea Party in 2009. And given that both of those movements were surprises to the members of the political and media establishment, you might think everyone would be motivated to make sure it didn't happen again.

I'll skip the dissection of where the political parties failed in this discussion, since I'm not inclined to write the book necessary to recount all of the missteps. Instead, let's focus on the Stelter's specific question. Specifically, why the cable news outlets so badly misjudged the mood of the country.

Since the days of Spiro Agnew, conservatives have used the term "media elite" as a catch-all criticism of the major media outlets. Everyone understands that in most cases, it's a dog whistle to voters and it really means "liberal media." So when most journalists hear that criticism, they tend to ignore it. Besides, it's only human nature to see yourself as not that much different than the rest of the country. If you don't feel as if you're a member of the elite, than you must not be one, right?

But over the past decade, the term "media elite" has developed a very different meaning to people living between the two coasts. It signifies a group of people who might mean well, but can't comprehend the challenges being faced by many Americans. They live a life that seems "average," but it's an economically sheltered existence that makes it difficult if not impossible to accurately reflect Middle America. It's the constricted world vision that can convince Silicon Valley venture capitalists to think a service for valet parking on demand is a scaleable business idea because they have trouble finding a place to park in San Francisco. It's not that their vision is incorrect, it's just a view defined by the information available to them.

It's the same case with the political media, especially on cable news. People shift from political campaigns to the role of professional pundits on a regular basis. And while hearing from someone who worked on a previous presidential campaign or a longtime party operative might seem smart on the surface, it ensures that viewers are going to hear a self-perpetuating conventional wisdom. And that works only as long as events flow in predictable ways. All of those otherwise wise political types who predicted the early collapse of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders weren't wrong. They made a solid judgement based on the flawed information they had available to them.

And that's the problem. Relying on voices who live in the Beltway and/or work with major media outlets based on either coasts ensures you'll only hear variations of conventional wisdom. Everyone knows each other and reads each other's work. A subtle involuntary consensus forms based on information gathered from incomplete data sets. This is how otherwise smart journalists can argue that economic inequity won't resonate with voters in 2016 because the "economy is improving." Yes, based on cold government employment numbers that is true. But that isn't the way it feels in Middle America and it's something cable news would have picked up on earlier if they hadn't have been so captured by the need to reflect the conventional wisdom of Washington.

All of this is amplified by the habit of cable news channels decision to show "both sides of an issue" by booking endless panels with a strategist from each side of the political spectrum. It's endless hours of the same arguments, playing like some sad political Kabuki theater. And in the end, it has no connection to what matters between the coasts.

My mother lived through the worst of the 1920's depression. She quit school in eighth grade in order to take care of her siblings and she remembered what it was like to be hungry her entire life. Once you've been through such a gut-wrenching experience, you can never quite shake the feeling that everything can go horribly wrong at any moment. It was a common reaction in people who grew up in that period of American history and that drive to make sure your family will always be protected molded the country for much of the rest of the 20th Century.

I always understood that reaction on an intellectual level, but it wasn't until I went through a similar experience that I fully comprehended the impact financial struggles can have on your soul. I went through a period not that long ago when it seemed as if the only thing facing me on a daily basis was more pain. My family and I were as close to homelessness as you can be without living in your car. I was scrambling to find work at an age when I should be thinking about my eventual retirement. I know what it's like to lay in bed at night, hungry and worried that I won't be able to figure out a way to put a few gallons of gas in the car. I've lived through having to sell off possessions to pay the rent or pawn my wedding ring in order to pay for an emergency room visit. These are experiences you never quite come back from. These are the events that you think of every time you hear some politician or reporter pontificate about things getting better. There's always this voice inside your head that worries the fragile life you've rebuilt can suddenly collapse again through no fault of your own.

I know lots of people with similar experiences. Good, hard-working people who've lost jobs that provided them with a middle-class life they can't recapture. On an intellectual level it's easy to be pro-immigration and pro-business. But if your job has headed overseas because the company was tired of paying pension benefits or your company shut down because an equity firm decided they could make more money selling off the parts of an otherwise healthy business, than you don't feel much else other than anger and fear. You don't forget the struggles and the more that you hear politicians and reporters talking about an America you don't recognize, the angrier you get. You want to believe someone in power actually cares about you and isn't owned by the same rich and powerful people who helped ruin your life while still managing to collect a multi-million dollar fee at the same time.

I could never vote for Donald Trump but I can understand why someone could support him if they believed he could "make America great again." The political and media elites hear that phrase and it sounds like just another jingoistic bit of political theater. It is, but the phrase resonates very differently rest of the country. In this context, making America great isn't about rampant nationalism or a hatred of anyone with a different skin color or sexual identity. For many people, a great America means one in which you can work hard and at the end of the day not worry that you'll wake up tomorrow with your electricity turned off. It means one in which you can still believe that any American really does the chance to someday grow up to become President.

I spend much of my day writing about television and the media. So I suppose in some way, I'm an "insider." But I find myself often unable to watch cable news because the conversations taking place are so disconnected from the world I live in. When cable news decided to bring in new voices after the 2008 and 2012 elections, they ended up simply adding a few younger voices from places such as Buzzfeed or the Huffington Post. But these aren't new voices, they are just familiar arguments dressed up in a more millennial presentation. I'm not convinced that most of the people I see on cable news have any comprehension of what it's been like for Middle America over the past couple of decades. What it's like to feel as you've given everything you have to give and it's still not enough.

Sometimes late at night I lay in bed and think about the worst moment of my life. A couple of years ago, I had to tell my young son that we were moving out of a house he loved because we couldn't afford it any longer. He didn't just cry, his body sagged into my arms and he shook as he sobbed uncontrollably. "But I don't want to go," he whispered to me. "Please don't make me go."

That's the memory that comes to mind when I hear journalists prattle on in the abstract about what drives Middle America's anger.

There are millions of us with experiences just like that one. And if the past few years have taught us anything, it's that someone living in the sheltered world of the Beltway has no comprehension of what matters to us.