DeJa Vu Really! What I wrote in 2016 is all but 2024 with Trump’s win. Journalism fails again!

Sometimes you wade through history, other times you find the answers in yourself — younger.

This following paragraph is a direct lift from “An #EpicFail in Journalism and what ways can we fix it” that I wrote in 2016

History forgotten
Trump’s shock win as the only tremor in political history deserves context. In 1948, the election of America’s 41st U.S. president, president Harry Truman was truly seismic. Truman was not supposed to win against the favoured Republican Thomas Dewey.

At 5.6 ft, Truman had what critics referred to as a small-size man complex. His negotiating style was testy. On a number of occasions on foreign policy negotiations he threatened to drop the big one (nukes) on his adversaries. He did on Japan.

Astutely connecting to rural communities akin to today’s Trump play, Truman was in contrast to Trump a feisty liberal who supported African American rights.

However, three year’s earlier in one of the biggest u-turns in the Democrats, the party dropped a liberal and widely-loved politician by grass root members called Henry Wallace to make Truman President Roosevelt’s running mate.

Yesterday, history was reclaiming its clothes. The democrats machinery coming into sharp focus with shades of “Bernie would have won this”. But at least it was the Democrats then that triumphed.

#EpicFail

As a journalist and more so a social scientist there are many reasons you could attribute to the failure of traditional media.

Treating Trump as entertainment.

Journalists being misdirected and as such concentrating on values that were about character, rather than issues relating to jobs and the economy.

Print journalism has been in decline and so it was inevitable that journalists couldn’t cover wider issues in depth.

Data analyst and pollsters got it wrong. If you’re an ethnographer, you’ll have lots to say here. I have a double whammy, I grew up on data completing a degree in Chemistry and Mathematics.

And this too!

Some other interesting points appear in the 2016 write-up.

Author J.D. Vance claims the spotlight with his New York Times best seller Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. How times have changed!

Diversity was the key to unlock doors. That was way before BlackLives peaking. How important today and going forward is diversity in corporatedom?

Journalism failed back then and did so miserably again. I wrote “Trump supporters, it’s becoming clear, spanned different ages, incomes and demographics”, and yet there was very little deep effort to get into the substance of the electorate. Invariably the sum total of journalism is tiresome punditry and opinions.

Journalism isn’t dead. Those that practice it with such earnestness lacking empathy to understand have seemingly lost their way.

In 2016 in the UK, we had Brexit. The signs were glowing amongst its many supporters. That tide seems to have changed. For the US a new era, Trump V2 is about to unfold, and no pundit, no commentator could possibly know what’s about to happen with any degree of certainty.

I end with this another direct lift from An #EpicFail in Journalism and what ways can we fix it. Is it fixable?

The lesson for journalism is to move out of a developing recycled era of air-conditioned journalism where copy has never tasted the dry speckled air and where ethnographic writers are met by the forcefulness of raw dialect and ideas. Hint: if you’re in J-school and you haven’t spent an evening in a village talking to strangers demand you do.