The media, for all their faults, did not elect Donald Trump. His supporters knew exactly what they were doing. They heard it all—the racism, the misogyny, the personal attacks, the Russia connection, Trump University, and on and on and on. And they decided they’d rather vote for a bomb-thrower than continue with the status quo.
On this day of all days, I am loath to cite polling as a way of explaining anything. But as Bill Schneider wrote for Reuters, exit polls revealed that only 38 percent of voters believed Trump was qualified to be president, compared to 52 percent for Hillary Clinton. What does that tell you?
I swear that Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory does not send me these messages. But people do, and I thought this message to the Globe staff was worth sharing after what was a pretty amazing experience for all of us—let alone those who were trying to cover it as it unfolded.
From: McGrory, Brian
Date: Wed, Nov 9, 2016 at 4:09 AM
Subject: Thank you
Well, that didn’t exactly follow the script.
Which is what made your collective performance all the more extraordinary tonight. At 7 o’clock, people were exchanging notes about exit polls that indicated an early bedtime. At 3 a.m., we were redrawing the site and the print edition to allow for Trump’s victory speech. Charlie Mansbach, who has seen quite a bit in his half century, said he’s never seen anything like this.
It actually began a couple of months ago when a team of technologists and designers began the work of creating the elections pages and interactive graphics, which were nothing short of breathtaking. For a good chunk of the night, we had well over 20,000 concurrents, peaking at over 25,000. We were a destination for a huge number of readers.
It’s easy to understand why. Not only did we have some of the best graphics in the industry, but the work from the field was beyond impressive, whether it was NY, DC, or in and around Boston. The Washington bureau turned on a dime to allow for Matt [Viser] to write his extraordinary analysis in what seemed like 20 minutes. The mainbar read like a breeze. Locally, the Metro crew wrote the hell out of the ballot questions and so much more.
Photo was what photo always is, which is wildly creative and ambitious. Our graphics team covered us all in glory. It was nothing short of great to have the world-class technologists sitting among us, keeping the site purring along. Ditto for the social media crew.
As these things always happen, the pressure ratcheted up through the night. What was different here was that it kept going through the morning. Chris Chinlund was like a maestro at her page 1 perch, bringing everything together for print, with David Dahl playing an equally impressive role. I’m told we caught 33,000 papers with the final news. On the digital front, we’ve grown to accept how great the bg.com team is, but you see it more clearly than ever on a night like this. Katie [Kingsbury] was effectively everywhere—and always deeply effective. Jason [Tuohey] is simply a rock and a rock star. There are so many others, too, up and down the chain. Give credit, too, to the talented team at boston.com for keeping their site filled with energy while also playing a key role steering readers to Globe journalism.
It literally took the work of over 100 people to accomplish what we did tonight, from eagle-eyed copy editors to systems managers who arm-wrestled with Methode [the Globe’s content-management system] when things got hairy at exactly the time they couldn’t. History was made, and you responded as you always do, with some of the highest quality journalism in the nation. Thank you, sincerely.
Hillary Clinton has been ahead by about four points in the polls. My guess is that she’ll actually win by around six points, based on two factors.
First, she’s on the upswing, and was even before FBI director James Comey said, uh, never mind. Second, by all accounts she has an incredibly strong get-out-the-vote effort and Donald Trump has nothing.
No prediction on the Electoral College except that it won’t be close. And the Democrats will narrowly regain the Senate.
Maybe none of it mattered. Maybe the media’s widely derided coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign had little effect on where we stand days before this horror show comes to its merciful conclusion.
Consider: A Washington Post-ABC News tracking poll released Friday evening showed Clinton with a four-point lead—identical to President Obama’s margin of victory over Mitt Romney in 2012. As New York Times columnist David Brooks said Friday on the PBS NewsHour, “Everyone is dividing based on demographic categories. And, sometimes, you get the sense that the campaign barely matters. People are just going with their gene pool and whatever it is.”
But even if voting patterns are largely preordained in this hyperpolarized era, that’s no reason to let the media off the hook. Journalists have an indispensable role in our political system. They have a responsibility to provide us with the information we need to govern ourselves in a democratic society. And they have let us down.
Anthony Weiner during his New York mayoral campaign. Photo (cc) by Azi Paybarah.
At a time when no one knows anything about the latest Hillary Clinton email story beyond the cryptic letter that FBI Director James Comey sent to Congress last week, I decided that the best way to research this piece was to pour a glass of wine, grab some Halloween candy, and watch Weiner, a documentary released a few months ago.
I didn’t learn anything about the emails. But I did gain some insight, at least superficially, into the marriage between disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin, the top Clinton aide whose emails were reportedly found on her estranged husband’s computer.
If newspapers are going to survive and thrive, then various types of nonprofit/for-profit partnerships will almost certainly be part of the mix.
At the extreme end is the Philadelphia Inquirer, which, along with its sister paper, the Daily News, and their joint website, Philly.com, were donated earlier this year to the nonprofit Philadelphia Foundation. The media properties still need to find a way to break even, but it does save them from the pressure of cutting their way to profits in order to satisfy a corporate owner.
A more modest step was announced in today’s Boston Globe. Zoë Madonna, a young prize-winning critic, will be paid through a nonprofit grant to write about classical music for the next 10 months while Globe critic Jeremy Eichler is on leave at Harvard. The money will come from the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation.
According to a press release from the Rubin Institute, which awarded her its 2014 prize in music criticism, the benefactors “will consider an ongoing strategy to support this endeavor on a national scale” once Madonna’s stint at the Globe has been completed. Globe editor Brian McGrory is quoted as saying:
We could not be more delighted to participate in this novel experiment with such worthy partners. We are excited about the benefit to our industry, to some of the great cultural institutions of Boston, and most especially to our readership, which will very much appreciate the proven talents of this young critic.
Based on what we know so far, FBI Director James Comey’s bombshell letter is likely to lead to very little. Having upended the election campaign with just days to go, Comey owes it to the public to tell us exactly what the FBI knows as soon as possible.
Here’s what we seem to know: Clinton and her top aide, Huma Abedin, exchanged emails (now, there’s a big surprise, eh?). Some of those ended up on devices used by Abedin’s estranged husband, Anthony Weiner, because they shared a computer.
It is already well established that Clinton used a private email account for her official business, that she showed bad judgment in doing so, but that she did not commit a crime. Somewhere between many and all of the newly discovered emails may be duplicates that the FBI has already looked at.
There is nothing new here—just more evidence of what a mistake Clinton made in not using her State Department email account. For one thing, sensitive emails can end up in the hands of someone like Weiner.
Update: Jane Mayer of the New Yorker weighs in with essential reading on Comey’s decision to go public.
From time to time, some expert will predict that television is about to go the way of newspapers and music: disrupted by technology and broken into its constituent parts, with the dollars that used to flow like a mighty stream magically reduced to little droplets of digital dimes and pennies.
And yes, it may happen someday. But the news that AT&T will seek to buy Time Warner for $85 billion shows that it’s not going to be soon. The executives who run the major telecom and television companies are proving to be tough, wily, and ready for a long battle. Compared to the genteel folks in the news and music industries, these guys are like the Medellín cartel.
If you’re trying to figure out what’s going on regarding claims that Obamacare costs are spiraling out of control, I recommend this piece by Jonathan Chait of New York magazine. Chait really understands this stuff. The key takeaways:
The premiums announced for next year are about what had been predicted when the Affordable Care Act first went into effect. The reason the jump is so high now is that insurance companies initially underpriced their policies in order to get more people to sign up. And the premiums are still lower than they would have been without the ACA.
There are 50 insurance exchanges—one in each state. They are working well in states that supported the law and accepted federal assistance to expand Medicaid, and not well at all in states that didn’t. So it’s ongoing Republican resistance to the law, not the law itself, that is the source of some of the problems.
Complex legislation like the ACA often need fixes every now and again because there’s no way officials can predict with absolute certainty what’s going to happen. Unfortunately the ACA can’t be amended or fixed in the current political environment because the Republicans in Congress won’t allow it.
And thanks to Jonathan Cohn, a health-care expert in his own right, for flagging Chait’s article.
Mitt Romney on the campaign trail in 2012. Photo (cc) 2012 by Dave Lawrence.
Alex Beam’s column in today’s Boston Globe got me thinking: What would I do if Donald Trump were the Democratic nominee? Alex confesses that he was a late arrival in the #NeverTrump camp. I’m not a Democrat, but I am a liberal. Because of the unique threat I think Trump poses to our democracy, I’ve broken with past practice and said whom I’m voting for this time around: Hillary Clinton. I have great respect for Republicans and conservatives like Mitt Romney and Charlie Baker, who came out against Trump early on. But what would I do if the shoe were on the other foot?
So here’s my little mind game. I can’t think of a Democrat who’s analogous to Trump, so let’s just imagine that Trump himself had won the Democratic nomination; it’s not that far-fetched given his chameleon-like political identity over the years. And since Trump is hardly a traditional conservative, let’s imagine, too, that there’s one significant issue on which he departs from Democratic orthodoxy. For the sake of argument, I’ll stipulate that Trump the Democrat holds the same views on immigration as Trump the Republican.
Now, then. There aren’t really any moderate Republicans left on the national stage, but there are rational, sane Republicans: Romney, Jeb Bush, and John Kasich to name three. So let’s extend this experiment by imagining that Romney had somehow won the nomination. How would I vote?
On the one hand, Trump the Democrat has promised to appoint Supreme Court justices who’d protect same-sex marriage and reproductive rights, to raise the minimum wage, and to reform Obamacare by seeking to add a public option. Romney has promised the opposite, and has vowed to repeal Obamacare, even though it’s based on Romneycare. On the other hand, Trump is Trump, with all the baggage we’ve seen on display throughout this campaign.
I would like to think I’d vote for Romney, but I’m honestly not 100 percent sure. Part of me believes that we could survive four years of Trump the Democrat, and that it would be worth it so as not to unleash the right. Then again, Romney’s a sensible guy, and maybe he could find some sort of middle ground.
