As NewsBusters has documented, journalists continually predicted a Hillary victory, skewed coverage in her favor, and were heartbroken when she lost. All the celebratory joy media personalities felt in 2008 was gone. Yesterday, MRC President Brent Bozell called the media “the second-biggest losers” of this election.
And apparently even a few members of the media are starting to realize this. Will Rahn, a political correspondent and managing director for politics for CBS News Digital, wrote an opinion piece on November 10, criticizing journalists for their “unbearable smugness.”
"It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump’s victory. More than that and more importantly, we also missed the story, after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on.
"This is all symptomatic of modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing: its unbearable smugness. Had Hillary Clinton won, there’s be a winking 'we did it' feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic."
Later on in the piece, he elaborated, “[j]ournalists increasingly don’t even believe in the possibility of reasoned disagreement, and as such ascribe cynical motives to those who think about things a different way.”
Rahn called on his fellow journalists to “become more impartial, not less so. We have to abandon our easy culture of tantrums and recrimination. We have to stop writing these know-it-all, 140-character sermons on social media and admit that, as a class, journalists have a shamefully limited understanding of the country we cover.”
