Trump this

[Warren Toda]

Now that the US elections are over (and some of us won a number of bets), every news outlet is doing postmortems and are now brilliantly explaining what went wrong and why (actually, nothing went wrong).

It's much like this: before the match, a news outlet says, "The Blue team will win," and the moment the Blue team loses, that same news outlet responds, "We knew the Blue team would lose because..."

Good article by Robin Rowland.  Another by Jeff Jarvis.

These two articles aren't just about the recent US elections but also about the sad state of journalism today. Yes, you can blame +15 years of cutbacks and downsizing. This is partly how we got here.

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In the recent US elections, it looks like :

         46.6% of eligible voters didn't vote.

          25.6% voted for Hillary Clinton

          25.5% voted for Donald Trump

          1.7% voted for Gary Johnson

The two takeaways are:

           (1) Every vote counts. It appears that most of the non-voters were Democrats.

           (2) Of the people who did vote, it looks like half voted wisely and the other half were fools. But at this point, we don't know which half is which. 

[Dominic Chan]

Also the ownership of the media, especially in the US. News outlet are no longer neutral.

[Richard Ernst]

Dominic,

News outlets have never been neutral. This is an impossibility.

What all journalists should strive to be is truthful.

Report facts and photograph real life.

Ric Ernst.

[Warren Toda]

I don't think news organizations should endorse or support any political party (or religion for that matter). They should be neutral when they try to be truthful; balanced reporting is important. There's a saying that's there's always three sides to every story: your side, their side and the truth.

I've worked at newspapers where election campaign and other political stories were heavily biased. This wasn't due to any editor or reporter but rather it was the newspaper publisher or CEO who was trying to get their friend elected or keep their elected friend in good light.

I worked at a newspaper where the CEO directed news coverage of two political campaigns (one municipal and the other provincial). There were direct orders to not run anything that might harm his friend's campaign. I know that this has happened at some other papers too.

I've been at a newspaper where a candidate's campaign office was allowed to phone into the newsroom and direct news coverage. They would phone in photo assignments - all of which were mandatory -  and they would kill any story they didn't like.

I've worked at a paper where coverage of a provincial premier was heavily biased - and everyone in the newsroom knew it - because the premier was a friend of the newspaper's CEO. News stories were extremely one-sided to the point of gross distortion.


Some news organizations have lost the plot. They've forgotten why, because they're too concerned about what, which means they no longer know how.