Today, the media is so far removed from the people that it is representing and the result of the 2016 election is a perfect example. The biggest and most noteworthy publications that people turn to are all located in big cities — locations that are a small fraction of the population of America. This big divide between media and the people it represents is part of the reason that the 2016 election results were such a shock.
My favorite publication (after Technician, of course) is probably The Atlantic. Their office is situated in the middle of Washington, D.C., a city whose people tend to be a rare mix of higher education and hustle. The people of D.C. are far removed from the rest of America since those who move there are typically migrating with a certain political agenda or in hopes of landing a job in politics or journalism. The location of The Atlantic alone is one reason for its heavily skewed depiction of how they represented Donald Trump. I was following their articles for months and, after a while, I actually got tired of reading about how unfit Trump was to be president or about his latest scandal. It made one thing very, very clear: The Atlantic didn’t like Trump.
They weren’t alone in this opinion. As of Oct. 25, only six newspapers had endorsed Trump, which is the fewest any candidate has ever received. It wasn’t even that newspapers were simply endorsing Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. Many papers even took steps to “un-endorse” Trump, including USA Today, which broke its usually neutral stance to tell readers not to vote for Trump. At the time, the publications thought endorsing Trump was the brave thing to do. David Bradley, from St. Joseph News-Press, said that he was “not afraid to be [a] maverick in the herd.” Since Trump was so unpopular with publications, it was easy to think that he must be this unpopular with America’s population, since the media is meant to represent the masses.
And it wasn’t just newspapers. There wasn’t a single late night talk show host that said anything nice about the president-elect. Seth Meyers is particular notable since his show is almost a spin-off of his political comedy sketches from Saturday Night Live. Meyers has been roasting Trump since 2011 at the White House Correspondents dinner and continued all throughout the election. I suspect it’s become somewhat of a staple in his comedy routine so I doubt the roasting is stopping anytime soon. Among all the jokes about Trump, it again became very clear that the late-night talk show hosts didn’t like him.
All of this is good, but you don’t have to look too far to find a lack of representation for Trump supporters because Technician happened to do the same thing. According to the Pack Poll’s fall survey, 27 percent of NC State Students had either definitely decided or were leaning towards voting for Donald Trump when the poll came out on Oct. 10, but you would have never been able to tell that NC State had that many Trump supporters within our campus if you had simply looked at our school paper. The paper had an overwhelming number of articles that were not only voting for Clinton, but were very, very much against Trump. As a staff writer, you have to be well-informed and research every opinion that the paper publishes so it wasn’t as if the opinions in favor of Hillary Clinton were misguiding. The issue comes from the fact that the community of writers happens to be pretty liberal, leading to our failure to represent the entire student body that includes conservative and neutral students as well. Apparently, this is also an issue with The New York Times, one of America’s most credible publications. Even a liberal reader wrote in to say that they would get “so frustrated with one-sided reporting that I would start hopping over to the Fox News webpage to read an article and get the rest of the story that the NYT refused to publish.” In a way, Technician probably frustrated the NC State student body just as much.
On a more global scale, the media caused the shock that the whole world is facing. Headlines now read, “Donald Trump Stuns the World and Wins 2016 Presidential Election” and “A Stunning Upset.” They aren’t wrong. I am living in London now, so I know that people that I have talked to there were shocked with the results. When the votes were being counted and broadcasted, I was actually in Pakistan, but my family had the same reaction as those in England. Even though these two places represent only a small amount of the whole population, they are vastly different and both sets of people I interacted with had the same reaction to the election results, especially because the media made it seem like Hillary was the obvious choice.
In terms of opinions represented in articles from The New York Times and jokes made by late-night talk show hosts, my political opinion was represented. However, those opinions in mass media clearly were not representative of people in the states that gave Trump the electoral votes that handed him the presidency. I am a believer in the good and necessity of the media, but I also think that media, including our school paper, took a loss this election season in doing what it should do: voice the opinions of the masses and represent the entire population.
