The Atlantic: Conservative Media have failed Republicans, lost to MSM

[Syt]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/how-conservative-media-failed-their-readers/264855/

Before rank-and-file conservatives ask, "What went wrong?", they should ask themselves a question every bit as important: "Why were we the last to realize that things were going wrong for us?"

Barack Obama just trounced a Republican opponent for the second time. But unlike 4 years ago, when most conservatives saw it coming, Tuesday's result was, for them, an unpleasant surprise. So many on the right had predicted a Mitt Romney victory, or even a blowout -- Dick Morris, George Will, and Michael Barone all predicted the GOP would break 300 electoral votes. Joe Scarborough scoffed at the notion that the election was anything other than a toss-up. Peggy Noonan insisted that those predicting an Obama victory were ignoring the world around them. Even Karl Rove, supposed political genius, missed the bulls-eye. These voices drove the coverage on Fox News, talk radio, the Drudge Report, and conservative blogs.

Those audiences were misinformed.

Outside the conservative media, the narrative was completely different. Its driving force was Nate Silver, whose performance forecasting Election '08 gave him credibility as he daily explained why his model showed President Obama enjoyed a very good chance of being reelected. Other experts echoed his findings. Readers of The New York Times, The Atlantic, and other "mainstream media" sites besides knew the expert predictions, which have been largely born out. The conclusions of experts are not sacrosanct. But Silver's expertise was always a better bet than relying on ideological hacks like Morris or the anecdotal impressions of Noonan. Sure, Silver could've wound up wrong, but people who rejected the possibility of his being right?

They were operating at a self-imposed information disadvantage.

Conservatives should be familiar with its contours. For years, they've been arguing that liberal control of media and academia confers one advantage: folks on the right can't help but be familiar with the thinking of liberals, whereas leftists can operate entirely within a liberal cocoon. This analysis was offered to explain why liberal ideas were growing weaker and would be defeated.

Today?

It is easy to close oneself off inside a conservative echo chamber. And right-leaning outlets like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh's show are far more intellectually closed than CNN or public radio. If you're a rank-and-file conservative, you're probably ready to acknowledge that ideologically friendly media didn't accurately inform you about Election 2012. Some pundits engaged in wishful thing; others feigned confidence in hopes that it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy; still others decided it was smart to keep telling right-leaning audiences what they wanted to hear.

But guess what?

You haven't just been misinformed about the horse race. Since the very beginning of the election cycle, conservative media has been failing you. With a few exceptions, they haven't tried to rigorously tell you the truth, or even to bring you intellectually honest opinion. What they've done instead helps to explain why the right failed to triumph in a very winnable election.

Why do you keep putting up with it?

Conservatives were at a disadvantage because Romney supporters like Jennifer Rubin and Hugh Hewitt saw it as their duty to spin constantly for their favored candidate rather than being frank about his strengths and weaknesses. What conservative Washington Post readers got, when they traded in Dave Weigel for Rubin, was a lot more hackery and a lot less informed about the presidential election. 

Conservatives were at an information disadvantage because so many right-leaning outlets wasted time on stories the rest of America dismissed as nonsense. World Net Daily brought you Birtherism. Forbes brought you Kenyan anti-colonialism. National Review obsessed about an imaginary rejection of American exceptionalism, misrepresenting an Obama quote in the process, and Andy McCarthy was interviewed widely about his theory that Obama, aka Drone Warrior in Chief, allied himself with our Islamist enemy in a "Grand Jihad" against America. Seriously?

Conservatives were at a disadvantage because their information elites pander in the most cynical, self-defeating ways, treating would-be candidates like Sarah Palin and Herman Cain as if they're plausible presidents, rather than national jokes who'd lose worse than George McGovern.

How many months were wasted on them?

How many hours of Glenn Beck conspiracy theories did Fox News broadcast to its viewers? How many hours of transparently mindless Sean Hannity content is still broadcast daily? Why don't Americans trust Republicans on foreign policy as they once did? In part because conservatism hasn't grappled with the foreign policy failures of George W. Bush. A conspiracy of silence surrounds the subject. Romney could neither run on the man's record nor repudiate it. The most damaging Romney gaffe of the campaign, where he talked about how the 47 percent of Americans who pay no income taxes are a lost cause for Republicans? Either he was unaware that many of those people are Republican voters, or was pandering to GOP donors who are misinformed. Either way, bad information within the conservative movement was to blame.

In conservative fantasy-land, Richard Nixon was a champion of ideological conservatism, tax cuts are the only way to raise revenue, adding neoconservatives to a foreign policy team reassures American voters, Benghazi was a winning campaign issue, Clint Eastwood's convention speech was a brilliant triumph, and Obama's America is a place where black kids can beat up white kids with impunity. Most conservative pundits know better than this nonsense, not that they speak up against it. They see criticizing their own side as a sign of disloyalty. I see a coalition that has lost all perspective, partly because there's no cost to broadcasting or publishing inane bullshit. In fact, it's often very profitable. A lot of cynical people have gotten rich broadcasting and publishing red meat for movement conservative consumption.

On the biggest political story of the year, the conservative media just got its ass handed to it by the mainstream media. And movement conservatives, who believe the MSM is more biased and less rigorous than their alternatives, have no way to explain how their trusted outlets got it wrong, while the New York Times got it right. Hint. The Times hired the most rigorous forecaster it could find. 

It ought to be an eye-opening moment.   

But I expect that it'll be quickly forgotten, that none of the conservatives who touted a polling conspiracy will be discredited, and that the right will continue to operate at an information disadvantage. After all, it's not like they'll trust the analysis of a non-conservative like me more than the numerous fellow conservatives who constantly tell them things that turn out not to be true.

[derspiess]

Yes, because we're in such a mood to be lectured to by The Atlantic

Anyway, I'm genuinely surprised that Obama was able to generally match his voter enthusiasm from '08.  I couldn't even find people here who were certain it would be so.

[Scipio]

This is not 1984.  This is 2004.

And I am not surprised, nor am I unhappy.  I hope the GOP has some sense knocked into it.  The GOP had no message, they had no goals, they had no candidates.  The circular firing squad continues to reap dividends for the Dems.  And I sincerely hope that the LP getting over a million votes caused some GOP losses (although it is too much to hope for that they took down Romney).

But what has this election proven?  My takeaways: Citizens United just changed the cost of the message, not the message itself.  Voter ID laws- minimal impact, and they will have less and less impact over the next generation.  America- not overwhelmingly racist, thanks, Europe.  Contact me when an ethnic minority becomes PM of France, Britain, or Germany, you hypocrites.  You still keep them all locked up.  One term presidencies: even rarer in the future than they were in the past.  Gay rights is the future.  Abortion remains legal, but marginal.  NDAA, USAPATRIOT Act, and FISA continue unabated, killing more brown people in foreign stans.  Drones in American skies, but particularly over CO and WA, where pot is now state-legal.  Good luck with that, people.  Anti-immigration position is useless.

[Ed Anger]

America- not overwhelmingly racist, thanks, Europe.

[viper37]

Contact me when an ethnic minority becomes PM of France, Britain, or Germany, you hypocrites. 

Sarkozy was the son of an Hungarian immigrant, and one of his grandparent was Jewish.
So for France, it's been done.
For Britain, well, they had German kings at some point, so I guess it counts

[Iormlund]

Contact me when an ethnic minority becomes PM of France, Britain, or Germany, you hypocrites. 

In Spain it's going to take a while. Our minorities are mostly made of recent inmigrants who often lacked access to even basic education back home. Then there's Gypsies, who have the same barrier for entirely different reasons.

[Viking]

Contact me when an ethnic minority becomes PM of France, Britain, or Germany, you hypocrites. 

Sarkozy was the son of an Hungarian immigrant, and one of his grandparent was Jewish.
So for France, it's been done.
For Britain, well, they had German kings at some point, so I guess it counts

King's don't count. Disraeli does.

[DontSayBanana]

Sarkozy was the son of an Hungarian immigrant, and one of his grandparent was Jewish.
So for France, it's been done.
For Britain, well, they had German kings at some point, so I guess it counts

Let's not forget the kings that spoke French, not English.

[crazy canuck]

America- not overwhelmingly racist, thanks, Europe. 

I wonder whether any other nation pays so much attention to breaking down the vote by race.  You might not notice it because perhaps that is your everyday experience but looking at it from outside it was odd to hear every 2 minutes or so on every channel how the white vote was becoming less important and the latino vote would become critical.

I think I even heard someone refer to the electorate as becoming "non-white".

Perhaps not racist in itself to make these kinds of observations but it does seem to paint a picture of a nation that views Whites as the standard and non white as others.

[DGuller]

Yes, because we're in such a mood to be lectured to by The Atlantic

Please don't be lectured by it.  The stupidity festering in the Republican echo chambers may be quite irritating at times when it jizzes into the real world, but days like yesterday certainly do make it easier to handle.

[Martinus]

Funny as this describes to a T Polish religious conservatives who follow Kaczynski, believe that the plane crash was a Russian plot and that the government is sold to a Russo-German condominium. They have their own media, their own cocoon of news sources, even their own brand of Catholicism - and they constantly fail to win elections (another soviet plot).

I wonder - have such groups always existed or are they a byproduct of the information age, where some people just can't cope and the elderly are not wise, but merely out of touch.

[Zanza]

Contact me when an ethnic minority becomes PM of France, Britain, or Germany, you hypocrites. 

Sarkozy was the son of an Hungarian immigrant, and one of his grandparent was Jewish.
So for France, it's been done.
For Britain, well, they had German kings at some point, so I guess it counts

Our most (in-)famous politician ever was an illegal immigrant. 

We currently have a female chancellor, a gay foreign minister, a paraplegic finance minister, a ethnic Asian vice-chancellor/economics minister, so while we never had an ethnic minority on the top job, we are developing in the right direction as far as I can tell.

[DGuller]

Funny as this describes to a T Polish religious conservatives who follow Kaczynski, believe that the plane crash was a Russian plot and that the government is sold to a Russo-German condominium. They have their own media, their own cocoon of news sources, even their own brand of Catholicism - and they constantly fail to win elections (another soviet plot).

I wonder - have such groups always existed or are they a byproduct of the information age, where some people just can't cope and the elderly are not wise, but merely out of touch.

Information Age is certainly a double-edged sword.  More information only helps is the information is processed correctly, otherwise it may actually be hurtful.

For example, if you have 3 election polls, the amount of prediction you can do with them is limited in a tight election.  If you have 100, you can predict quite well.  However, if you have a 100 polls, you can also just cherrypick the ones that paint the rosiest picture for your guy, in which case you would've been better off with just the 3 polls.

[Barrister]

Funny as this describes to a T Polish religious conservatives who follow Kaczynski, believe that the plane crash was a Russian plot and that the government is sold to a Russo-German condominium. They have their own media, their own cocoon of news sources, even their own brand of Catholicism - and they constantly fail to win elections (another soviet plot).

I wonder - have such groups always existed or are they a byproduct of the information age, where some people just can't cope and the elderly are not wise, but merely out of touch.

If you go back 100 years you'll find every city had multiple newspapers, all with their own very obvious political bias and affiliation.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with getting your news from more "biased" sources - they're much more likely to give you stories you're actually interested in.  But you do need to be conscious of those biases as you do so.

[Martinus]

Indeed - hence my point. In most people information cacophony leads to scepticism and critical thinking (traits usually associated with the left) but some people can't cope with it and instead latch to whatever ideology promises stability and portraits the outside world not as a changed chaotic landscape, but as a mirage and a conspiracy where all things have a (sinister) cause.