Biggest losers in elections: political media and pollsters

Whatever the final outcome of the presidential election, the biggest losers have been President TrumpDonald Trump Senate rejects attempt to block Saudi arms sale by Biden Crenshaw denounces House Freedom Caucus members as “con artists”, Senate “performance artists” confirms Biden’s candidate for head of customs and border protection PLUShis greatest enemies: the political media and their colleagues in the polling institutes.

As one media watchdog concluded, more than 95 percent of national media reports and comments on President Trump was hostile. They showed astonishing consistency and perseverance in crafting false accusations to be thrown at him every campaign week. Until the very end of the campaign, the Democrat Joe bidenJoe BidenHouse passes Defense Policy Bill 8B House approves bill to facilitate passage of debt ceiling hike Senate rejects attempt to block Biden Saudi arms sale MORE angrily repeated the pure invention that Trump had described America’s war dead as “losers and suckers.” The famous author of “Anonymous” opinion attack, published two years ago by the New York Times as coming from a prominent administration insider, turned out to be a junior official in the Department of Homeland Security.

Historians of the future will identify the reasons for the frenzied, relentless and often dishonest attacks by almost any media on Trump and his administration. I suspect the reason was simple: Trump, when he ran in 2016, attacked the entire political class and specifically identified the national political media as the culprits for the abuse of their profession and their jobs. positions and their inability to serve and inform the public with integrity. then the media felt both threatened and vengeful, and a collective psychology emerged that they had to destroy the president or be destroyed by him.

Trump appears to have lost the election, but not the admiration of dozens of followers because of the significance of his accomplishments as president – and the promising new leadership he has given the Republican Party as he strongly encroaches on the traditional democratic hold on the voices of the popular classes and ethnic minorities.

All mainstream television networks, cable news networks except Fox (and he too had his wobbly moments), public broadcasters, and almost all of the major newspapers and magazines were consistent, consistent, deeply dishonest and d ‘a nauseating pharisaism in their endless denigration of the president. And the mainstream media were all associated with polling organizations, which faithfully reflected the biases of their affiliate media.

Charitable observers of the poll debacle, almost all of whom greatly overestimated public support for Biden and Democrats in general, attributed the failure to the public assimilating investigators into the media, transferring them to pollsters. their distrust of the media and their reluctance to speak to polling organizations. It is difficult to give the benefit of a charitable interpretation to organizations that were themselves incapable of charity. It is more likely that many polling organizations, whether on instruction from their media partners or spontaneously, have maliciously decided to distort the state of public opinion and create an atmosphere of inevitable defeat for the president.

Very few major national media or polling organizations escape the stigma of the perpetrators of this slanderous attack on the president and his party. One of the more humorous post-election blasts was the New York Times attack on aggregation site RealClearPolitics (RCP). The Times’ Nate Cohn attacked RCP for the inaccuracy of its daily poll average; RCP Chairman Tom Bevan responded by reciting the unbroken consistency of the Times’ stupidly inaccurate poll results throughout the campaign, still largely against Trump. In fact, the polls that averaged the RCP were almost all arms of the media organizations that have spent the past four years trying to destroy the president, and therefore any average of them was likely to be hogwash.

The fact that Trump came out as strong as he did, that nothing happened, not even remotely resembling the blue Democratic wave that orchestrated media and investigators predicted and promoted, and the strength of the Republican vote in the Congressional elections, all of this demonstrates moral bankruptcy and squandered the credibility of the media and polling bodies.

Somehow, the self-inflicted media damage seemed to reach its limit. Twitter’s announcement by its “Civic Integrity” unit of a warning regarding the accuracy of one of the president’s statements on election night; At first I thought it was a send off from “Saturday Night Live”, an initiative so pompous and absurd that it must have been the work of comedians. But this is indicative of the delusional righteousness of contemporary American political media. Even Fox News was not immune; he has fiercely defended the quality of his polls even though, half an hour earlier, he had mistakenly stated that North Carolina was 83% likely to vote for Biden. And the veteran of the Fox newspaper Chris WallaceChristopher (Chris) WallaceMurthy calls on people to be “more vigilant” on omicron, but not to panic Ernst over Russia’s build-up on the Ukrainian border: “We have to prepare for the worst” Fauci to appear on Fox Business Friday for a rare interview on the SUITE network, in response to the president’s election night announcement that he was acting legally to block Democrats’ attempted election theft, histrionically referred to Trump throwing a lit match into a pool of gasoline.

Either way, Trump has been a remarkably successful president, quirky and important political leader, and renovator of the dying Bush-McCain-Romney Republican Party, whom the country’s political media have generally looked down upon. The interviewees are a joke, and it will take decades of “civic integrity” to regain any credibility. Even if they reoccupy the White House, the Democrats are in shambles; they lose their base, have grossly incompetent national office candidates, and will not be freed from their compromised ethics quickly or easily. And Biden, once in power, can sweep away the heaviness John Durham Investigation of the alleged unconstitutional assault on Trump’s election, as well as any serious investigation into the alleged greed members of Biden’s own family while he was vice president.

But Democrats’ exploitation of the COVID-19 crisis to produce an unprecedented farrago of electoral peculiarities through the harvesting of ballots will not have an effortless passage through the courts. Joe Biden spoke of a “dark winterto come. If that happens, he, his managers and funders will be the main architects.

Conrad Black is an essayist, former newspaper editor, and author of ten books, including three on Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump. Follow him on twitter @ConradMBlack.