The mainstream media still doesn’t get Trump — or Middle America

Maybe because I’ve been a working journalist my entire adult life, I’m not nearly as interested in who’s to blame for Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss as I am in seeing how President-elect Donald Trump’s victory revealed (once again) how out of touch so many journalists are — how disconnected they are from all those folks who live west of Manhattan but east of Malibu.

When it became obvious that Trump was going to win, David Ignatius, the well-respected columnist at the Washington Post, wrote, “This election makes me realize how little I understand the American character in 2024 ... I am mystified by this outcome.”

Ignatius is a smart man, a perceptive journalist. Yet he may very well know more about Outer Mongolia than he does about Middle America — which may explain why he’s “mystified” by how Trump, a man we’ve been led to believe is a fascist who would usher in the Fourth Reich, could possibly have won.

Some elite journalists, ensconced inside a comfortable liberal media bubble, actually do venture, every now and then, into flyover country. But they don’t really know or understand people who live there — people who eat lunch at diners, who bowl on Thursday night and have supper (not dinner) at Applebee’s on Friday night; people who go to church on Sunday and don’t have a nanny from Central America watching the kids.

If more proof is required to show how elite journalists see their fellow Americans, New York Times columnist Charles Blow provides it. Trump’s victory, he asserts, is “what Americans want” because, “They are becoming more insular. They are becoming more hostile to foreigners, immigrants. They are becoming more protective of a legacy, and they believe that the story belongs to them and may be destroyed by the idea of progress.”

Maybe those “insular” Americans simply don’t like immigrants sneaking into the country. Maybe they don’t like looters taking whatever they want and getting away with it. Maybe it’s not “the idea of progress” they’re against, but progressive ideas about how biological boys should be allowed to play on girl’s sports teams. The liberal establishment may think this is progress, but most “ordinary” Americans don’t.

And from a writer named Jill Filipovic we get this observation, which she posted on X: “This election was not an indictment of Kamala Harris. It was an indictment of America.”

Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin blamed the media — ready for this? — for refusing “to explore Trump’s manifest defects and place him and his movement in the context of fascist strongmen and had the effect of normalizing and legitimizing a candidate utterly unfit for office.”

Trump may in fact have been a candidate unfit for office, a point I have made more than once. But the idea that the media refused “to explore Trump’s manifest defects” is preposterous to the point of comedy. Almost every word journalists wrote and uttered about Trump was negative. And perhaps much of it was deserved. But to blame his victory on the media going easy on him? Delusional!

And then there’s “PBS NewsHour” White House correspondent Laura Baron-Lopez who, on CNN, tried to make the case that Harris lost because, unlike Trump, she didn’t have a “media ecosystem” to help her win.

“There is an entire right-wing media ecosystem that doesn’t exist on the left and it does not exist in the center or mainstream and people are getting their information in very different ways now,” she said, “and that played a big role in this because of the fact that, like, whether it was disinformation, misinformation or different propaganda, that they were feeding to the American public, that made them feel the way they did, and the American public felt as though — that they were being heard by Donald Trump.”

Here’s another theory: A lot of Americans would rather get their information from people like Joe Rogan because they prefer open partisanship to partisanship masquerading as honest journalism.

As for that right-wing “media ecosystem” that Baron-Jones was fretting about — Alex Christy of the conservative Media Research Center had this to say: “Kamala Harris and Tim Walz’s media strategy consisted of interviews with ‘Call Her Daddy,’ Stephen Colbert, ‘Saturday Night Live,’ Jimmy Kimmel, ‘The Daily Show,’ ‘The “Breakfast Club,’ and MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle. If that isn’t a left-wing ecosystem, then what is?”

A recent Gallup poll showed that only 31 percent of Americans have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly.”

As Gerry Baker put it in his recent Wall Street Journal column, journalists have “squandered what little trust they still had among Americans by doubling down on naked partisanship — from consistent distortions of the words and deeds of Republicans, accompanied by collusion in the coverup of the Democratic president’s evident debility and his would-be successor’s equally evident incapabilities.”

All of this reminded me of one of my favorite observations about American journalism. It’s from Steven Brill, a journalist, author and lawyer, who wrote that, “When it comes to arrogance, power, and lack of accountability, journalists are probably the only people on the planet who make lawyers look good.”

I know — the truth hurts, right?

Bernard Goldberg is an Emmy and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award-winning writer and journalist. He is the author of five books and publishes exclusive weekly columns, audio commentaries and Q and As on his Substack page. Follow him @BernardGoldberg.