How do the media in uence their audience? 249they went wrong was in predicting turnout in a small number of rural counties in
Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—minor differences that were enough to
produce an electoral college victory for Trump. There is no evidence that pollsters were
biasing their results to hurt Trump. If anything, each pollster had a strong interest in
making correct predictions—any pollster would have been gratified to have been the
only one to predict that Trump would win.
Many journalists and commentators admit that they take an ideological or partisan
perspective. Talk show hosts Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, for example,
describe themselves as strong conservatives. And many commentators on the Fox
News Channel make no secret of their conservative viewpoint—just as commentators
on MSNBC make no secret of their liberal leanings. Similarly, the political news
magazine The Nation describes itself as “a weekly journal of left/liberal opinion,
covering national and international affairs as well as the arts.”^29 These journalists’ and
organizations’ points of view are well known and easy to identify. Some people might
even find the bias useful. A liberal, for example, could use The Nation’s endorsements
as a guide for which candidates to support, and a conservative might listen to Rush
Limbaugh to get similar information.
It is also no surprise that politicians complain that media coverage is biased against
them: the stakes for them are very high. For example, during the final weeks of the
2016 election, Donald Trump’s campaign wanted more coverage of its stance on trade
reform and its claims that Hillary Clinton was a corrupt politician, and less attention
paid to harassment claims against Trump and his poor performance in the presidential
debates. Clinton’s campaign in turn complained that the media was focusing too
much on rumors of Clinton’s health problems or the FBI investigation into her use
of an unsecure e-mail server and not enough on Trump’s missteps. Thus, while both
campaigns complained about bias, the simple explanation for their complaints is that
they wanted to win the election and therefore wanted media coverage that exposed
their opponent’s flaws rather than the flaws of their candidate.
In fact, while it is easy to find media coverage of politics that is incomplete or sloppily
reported, cases in which reporters made predictions that later turned out to be false, or
stories that candidates wish had not been reported, it is hard to find cases of systematic
bias in media coverage. For example, in the fall of 2015 Republican candidate Ben CarsonRepublican presidential candidate
Donald Trump being interviewed by
George Stephanopoulos, a so-called
liberal media person. Some critics of
media coverage claim that a liberal
interviewer would not be able to do an
impartial interview of a conservative
candidate (or vice versa).Full_08_APT_64431_ch07_232-261.indd 249 16/11/18 1:39 PM