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AP Photo What went wrong? Eleven takes from media veterans

What went wrong?

How did everyone in the media miss the Trump phenomenon? Were there signs that were ignored? Or was the media so ensconced in its data-driven ways that it missed the forest for the trees?

POLITICO Media reached out to a number of editors, executives and journalists, to gauge their reaction to what happened on Nov. 8, and what lessons the media can learn from the electoral surprise of the century.

The New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet: “I don’t buy that people wrote Trump off. I do think that we and the rest of the press corps weren’t completely in touch with, or understood the Trump voter. I think we need to do a better job going forward of explaining the divides that exist in America. I think we could do better writing about the people who voted for Donald Trump, understanding what drove them, their anxiety. I think it’s too simplistic to just see them as crazy people or deplorables. There aren’t that many deplorables in the United States. I think one of the biggest stories we all have to take on in the coming years is to understand that world better — the working class voters who feel like the forces of globalization and the rise of technology have left them behind. We need to understand that world better before there’s another election.”

Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron: “There’s a lot that wasn’t normal about this election. From the very beginning, the press made a lot of assumptions about what would have an impact on the race. It turned out that we should be more careful about making assumptions bc a lot of our assumptions turned out to be incorrect. So that’s a lesson for us -- perhaps before we presume that certain things will have a dramatic impact on an election, we need to do more reporting and talk to more people … Where I think that we should have done better and can do better in the future; I think we should have detected the depth of grievance and anxiety in America’s working class well before Trump became a candidate. It’s obviously our job to get out in the country and listen to people and to take the measure of the American public, and I don’t think we did as well as we should have, and we need to make sure we learn that lesson and make it a regular responsibility to really understand America’s working class.”

Univision chief news, digital and entertainment officer Isaac Lee: "Sometimes when you're seeing shots fired, it's hard to know that they're actually shooting at you. The media missed the anti-establishment tide overwhelming all of the western world because we were one of the main targets of the people's ire. As journalists, we should've known better. Polling from PEW and Gallup show that trust in journalists is at an all time low. This has been an existential threat that we have failed to address. We live in the age of inequality. One of the outcomes of inequality is that we wall ourselves off and resent each other. We journalists lately have too often been holed up in elite areas of New York, Washington, Palo Alto, Miami, or LA. We didn't realize that just a few miles away from us in places like Staten Island and Homestead, the people were there were hopeless and also hopeless about us. If we are to regain their trust we must move ourselves closer to the people. Remember who we are really supposed to serve (them), and hope to rebuild that relationship. It is on us."

Gawker Media founder Nick Denton: “The liberal media missed this for the same reason they missed Brexit: because they’re in the bubble. And they're no longer a national institution, but the representatives of a class... Biggest question is what happens to TV. First thing that Putin did was to establish control over state and then private television. Telling the oligarchs they could keep their money so long as they stopped meddling with state power. So what's the American equivalent? FCC regulation? Thiel consortium takes over Twitter? Punitive lawsuits? External conflict to prompt a rally-round-the-flag effect? An adversarial media did not persuade during this election campaign; in fact it may have reinforced the resentment of Trump voters. There's no reason to believe condemnation and investigation will be any more effective during a Trump administration. If the Trumpists fail, it will be because they in turn over-reach.”

Former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson: “I think there has to be more attention paid to the immense gulf between elites and the rest of the country, and that’s going to be hard to report on because [mainstream news] institutions are obviously seen as pillars of what some people see as the elite."

The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel: “I think one of the central factors was that the saturation coverage of Trump, certainly in those early critical months, the abetting of his rise... It wasn’t only that it was saturation coverage of Trump, but that it obscured a critical story of 2016, as we might understand this morning, which is that Americans are strikingly agitated not just about politics and governance but about an economic ‘recovery’ that never seems to reach them. I also think that it was an election about change and a revolt against political elites — [who] support global trade and tax deals of, by and for the corporations — [while] the consensus, almost suffocating consensus, in the mainstream media was in support of those trade deals or in support of a kind of neoliberal economics that has ravaged communities… “There was important coverage of his lies. They were holding him accountable for refusing to release his tax returns, for abuse of his foundation. But too often there was a false equivalence, often a symmetry drawn between Clinton and Trump as equal liars, which is wrong. But in the saturation coverage of Trump as unfit, the media for the most part wasn’t covering issues that were of real concern to people. So I do think there was a backlash effect against a media that was constantly denouncing Trump and by extension — and again I’m not speaking not of all Trump supporters but of many — it seemed by extension that the media was denouncing them or had contempt for them.”

Phil Boas, editorial page director at The Arizona Republic: “It was the most amazing election night I’ve witnessed. It was an incredible story, electric. It was fascinating to watch the news anchors. The script they had prepared was burning before their eyes. It was amazing to watch that... Conventional wisdom died last night… One of the accusations against the media in general this cycle has been that they made trump, gave him all this free advertising. I don’t believe that. The great failure of the media this time was to not see this coming, to not do the spadework ahead of time to understand what was building up in the country, and in the world.”

“Noticiero Univision” anchor Maria Elena Salinas: “I don’t think just the media got it wrong, the media got it wrong, the democratic party got it wrong, the pollsters got it wrong, I think a lot of people got it wrong... All media needs to look at how they covered him beginning with how they allowed someone like Trump to call in and talk as long as he wants and say whatever he wants without questioning him. They didn’t begin to question some of the outrageous things he was saying till the end. It gave him a free pass when he was insulting people. I think with no doubt, if there is one thing we all agree on, is if at any time any other candidate said some of the things Donald Trump said, including calling the media low life losers and scum that would’ve disqualified them from the process. No one would have put up with it. Yet we laughed it off and said what a silly thing from this man.”

Daily Beast executive editor Noah Shachtman: “I don’t think there's any one explanation that can tell you why so many folks in the media missed this potential for a Trump win. I think it’s a combination of factors. I think the polling data being so wrong is certainly a major impact. That’s especially bad on us because we’ve seen so many instances, time and time again, of the polls being off, that we really ought to have known better. To me, the big one is we kind of had this trust that [voters] would ultimately judge Trump as a future leader of the free world and not by the metrics by whether he was kind of a naughty celebrity or not."

The Forward editor Jane Eisner: “So yeah, I did miss [the Trump phenomenon]. But I missed it because I didn’t think that it was there in our community. Clearly, nearly a quarter of American Jews voted for Trump, so there were lots of reasons for it. But I think that there were reasons different from what we’re learning about that vast middle of America that went for him. I think the reasons that Jews went for him was in large part more to do with the perceptions that he would be more supportive of the Netanyahu government. While Trump as a candidate was all over the place in the way he described his Mideast policy and his policy toward Israel really fluctuated through the course of the campaign, still the Republican party this year, for the first time in a while, took a much more right-wing stance, basically saying that it didn’t think a two-state solution was going to happen anytime soon. So for those Jews who are a minority, but a sizable minority, who are much more hawkish about their Israel policy when it comes to the United States, I think that’s what drew them to Trump, more than sort of being part of the forgotten working class.”