The Alternate Reality Of Trump Voters Highlights Failure Of The Media

Prior to the election, the New Yorker had an article that interviewed twenty first time voters. The people chosen for the article represented a broad range, from old to young, from different areas of the country, different ethnicities, and all supporting different candidates. And all of them spoke of their various reasons for why they supported the candidate that they were going to vote for. But one thing in particular struck me as I read these opinions. Many of the people voting for Trump referred to something that was factually incorrect when they provided their rationale for voting. One hunter who relied on meat that he killed during the year proclaimed that Hillary was going to take away his guns and therefore his ability to hunt. Hillary made no such claim. Her position on gun control was to keep guns away from terrorists and the mentally ill.  Another would not vote for Hillary because she was a liar, saying, “You see the whole e-mail scandal, and she’s been caught in multiple lies about it”. Yet another believed that “terrorism has come to our shores… and it scares me to death”. The truth is that you have more than a 50 times greater chance of being killed by a police officer than you do by a terrorist in the United States. Two others simply were voting for Trump because he said whatever was on his mind.

Last night, Rachel Maddow released the results of the most recent PPP poll and it again highlighted this same type of phenomenon among Trump voters. The poll found that nearly 40% of Trump voters believed that the stock market had fallen while Obama had been President. The reality is that is up by over 250%. Two thirds of Trump voters believed that unemployment had actually risen during Obama’s terms. The reality is that it has dropped over 3% and is actually now near historic lows. The majority of supporters of the other three candidates all knew what the reality was. In addition, among Trump voters, 40% believe he won the popular vote while 60% believe that millions of illegals voted for Hillary. Incredibly, nearly 30% of Trump voters do not believe that California’s votes should count in the election, I’m assuming primarily because of all those illegal votes.

Obviously, the explosion of technology now allows for the dissemination of propaganda on a scale never before seen. The credibility of the national press has suffered the same fate as most of our other institutions and is not trusted. There is no national arbiter that can present the facts as newspapers and television news did when I was growing up. This is a problem that has been building for decades. I should think it would bother the mainstream media that such a significant bloc of the population could be so badly misinformed. They do, after all, have a number of constitutional protections and in return for that they are supposed to be keeping the citizens informed. But we have seen this failure to inform the public time and time again over the last few decades and the media’s response is to basically say it’s not their fault. Rather than doing nothing or, worse, enabling the propaganda, maybe the media could think about developing better strategies for countering the propaganda and informing us – less focus on personalities and horse races, continual articles and shows that drum certain core facts about what is happening in this country, and abandoning the “both-siderism” on certain subjects where the fact are indisputable. And, despite what Trump and his supporters want us to believe, there are still facts, there is still “truth”. Certainly, most every nightly news show has some air time filled with human interest stories that could be put to better use by actually informing us. It may not be the money-maker that the owners would want, but it at least would be performing their quasi-constitutional duty, which the PPP poll show they are clearly failing at now. I don’t have all the answers, but I do know that without a set of agreed upon facts, especially important facts about our economy and our government, it is difficult to see how you can have a functioning democracy.