The disconnect I keep coming back to is the one between the Trump that the news media has reported on for 4 years, and the Trump that 60+ million Americans just voted for. They aren't the same person. Those voters for the most part simply do not believe what we write or say.
I think all the media criticism about the need for NYT, CNN etc. to call Trump’s lies and racism for what they are was correct on its own merits. But the idea that the word choices of NYT, CNN etc. have any real *impact* on Trump or the GOP seems a bit deluded at this point, no?
To clarify, as some replies have noted, the issue obviously is not just that Trump voters don't believe the MSM, but that they hardly consume it at all, bc a right-wing media apparatus exists to serve them a very different set of facts and to reinforce their mistrust of the news.
This analysis is not novel, and there are ppl more expert than me who are worth turning to for solutions, but I think one immediate implication that should be uncontroversial at this point is that... (ran out of space, see next tweet)
America's epistemic crisis will not be solved at the level of editorial decisions by what we've previously considered "mainstream" news outlets, because there is in effect no longer any such thing.
The only true "mainstream media" now, in the sense of reaching broad swaths of both sides of the U.S. political spectrum, is Facebook—which as a news source is fundamentally premised on the idea that we're each entitled to the facts most likely to make us mash the "like" button.
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