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Lessons From 2016 for the News Media, as the Ground Shifts

From Jim Rutenberg:

Starting a weekly column about the nexus between media, technology, culture and politics in the middle of the 2016 presidential campaign was like parachuting into a hail of machine-gun crossfire.

Dense smoke was everywhere as the candidates and their supporters unloaded on one another and, frequently, the news media, which more than occasionally was drawn into the fighting.

The territory that was at stake was the realm of the true, and how all sides would define it in the hyperpartisan debate to come under a new president.

With the campaign behind us and a new administration quickly taking shape, that territory remains very much in dispute.

So the ammunition keeps flying, especially at the national news media, which emerges from the election invigorated in its mission to report on plate-shifting news while rooting out the truth. And yet it has never been more besieged or, if the Gallup Organization had it right, distrusted.

Sitting at my desk as I write this sentence on a Thursday night, our offices littered with empty champagne cups and cake crumbs on paper plates — the detritus of too many sayonara toasts to sage colleagues leaving with buyout packages — I’m trying to think my way to the big takeaway from the year American journalism just lived through that can help it in the downsized year ahead.

This much is obvious, but it bears repeating before the year turns: If the news media is going to do its part in maintaining a fact-based national debate, it’s going to have to learn important lessons from 2016. But the lessons need to be drawn not only from what it did wrong but also from what it did right.

What the mainstream media did wrong is by now well established. It generally failed to appreciate the power of the anger that ultimately decided the presidency. And that was in large part because it was overly hooked on polling that indicated a Hillary Clinton glide path, overly reliant on longtime sources who believed the rules of politics were immutable and too disconnected from too many workaday Americans. It repeatedly underestimated Donald Trump, not to mention Bernie Sanders. And there could have been a lot more reporting on both candidates’ policy plans, or lack thereof.

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