Thread by @ebboyd

Some thoughts on why the MSM & pundits missed the impact of abortion on the midterms. On why they so miscalculated the outcome of the elections.
And on what they can do better next time.
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This summer's coverage of the potential impact of Dobbs on the elections faded in the fall, and was overtaken by a focus on inflation and "gas prices." (Aka: "kitchen table issues.") There was talk of an impending "red wave."
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A friend asked me the other day why the predictions were so off-base. Here's what I told him:
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Who am I, btw? I came up in the MSM, working for CNN & the daily newspaper in Toledo, OH. Then I took a hard left and went to work in S.Valley tech co's, before returning to journalism to cover tech for Fast Company. (And later freelancing for a bunch of others.)
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So I've been inside. I've seen how the sausage is made. But I've also been outside. I have enough distance to look at it critically and understand how its culture and practices (which usually serve it well) can also significantly trip it up.
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A couple key principles impacted the MSM's failure this cycle:
A) There is a fundamental belief inside the MSM that the economy trumps everything. That people vote based on their wallets. It's not irrational to think this. It's the way it's been in many elections.
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B) Meanwhile, abortion has always been viewed as a "niche" issue. (ie: Yes, it's important to some people, but not so important that it could displace the economy as the most important issue for a meaningful chunk of people, esp in a time of shocking inflation.)
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So when the economy hit the fan this year, editors and reporters turned their attention there. (It probably wasn't even a conscious decision that inflation (aka "gas prices") would be the pre-eminent issue. It would have just been "known" to be true.)
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This is very natural. Few of us systematically question things we "know to be true."
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Added this, many newsroom decision-makers -- senior editors and senior producers -- are in their 40s and 50s. Their mindset frames are even more set. They operate on cognitive/decision-making shortcuts baked in over decades.
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(It's not just journalists who do this, of course. You see this in every industry. It's sometimes hard to convince senior leaders to change their ways of thinking when those ways have served them well over decades.)
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Lastly, journos are shockingly hive-minded for an industry whose core is about questioning. Individual journos and editors find it difficult to challenge a narrative that is prevailing on their beat.
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I know it sounds ridiculous, but we're all social creatures. Journos don't want to embarrass themselves in front of their peers by getting something shockingly wrong. It's OK to all be wrong together. But not to have "totally missed the story" that "everyone else" got.
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That works as a disincentive to start reporting something meaningfully different than what the hive is saying. (Even when your reporting is telling you so.) We saw it in the lead up to the Iraq War. In the coverage of Trump's 2016 campaign. I saw it on the tech beat.
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All of which is to say, this fall, even if a particular reporter or editor had an instinct that abortion was going to play a bigger role in the midterms, it would have been very hard to persuade one's organization to invest more reporting on that, vs. on the economy
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So how can the MSM do better next time?
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A) They need to develop internal methodologies & strategies for questioning the things they believe to be true. They need to have milestones at which they ask themselves: Is this frame under which we're operating still true? Do we need to adjust the frame?
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Doing so is hard & time-consuming in an industry that moves fast & where everyone is strapped, of course. But if one's mission is to report accurately, then it has to be part of the process
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B) Folks in the MSM need to begin to understand that abortion is no longer a niche issue.
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Sure, it might have been previously, when it was "settled law." When no one was worried that it was going to be taken away.
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But a tectonic shift happened this summer for 50% of the electorate.
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The minute the Dobbs decision was announced, many women felt themselves go cold. They understood in way that hadn't been clear 24 hours earlier that they were now, existentially, under threat.
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For them, the decision wasn't about a narrow medical procedure.
A decision had been made that the state could control your life.
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Women understood that if the state was willing to pull this right back, they would be willing to pull back other rights. (Which has since borne out.) They understood this wasn't about a procedure. It was the first salvo in a fight to roll back rights and control their lives.
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This is what the MSM and the pundits missed. They continued to view abortion as niche. Perhaps as a question of morality that people discussed in the privacy of their living rooms, with no greater significance for their larger lives.
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But everything changed for women this summer. Everything. Why would you possibly care about gas prices when you understood a fight had begun to take away your your right to live your life as you see fit? To make you "less than" the other 50% of the population can?
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The results of the midterms reflected this fundamental shift:
- All 4 abortion ballot measures came out overwhelmingly pro-choice.
- Abortion mattered _as much_ to voters as inflation
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Feelings about those measures almost certainly impacted how the electorate voted on other parts of the ticket.
And with that, your red wave disappears.
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If the MSM is going to do better covering future elections, it needs to adopt a humility around how much their past experience can inform their future coverage. They must be more willing to question what they "know to be true."
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We all went into journalism bc we want to help people understand the world they live in. The drastic diff bw what the MSM was reporting & how the election turned out shows there are some serious gaps in how journalism is doing that. It's time to take stock & adjust
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