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Comment by Inconel | Hacker News Reader

The article starts off stating that Hillary Clinton was the choice of nearly every newspaper editorial review board, and that despite those endorsements it didn't matter. Does anyone else find this incredibly tone deaf, particularly after last night's results?

To be clear, I did not vote for Trump, but my rejection of his candidacy was certainly not based on the stance of the LA Times editorial board. To be honest, with the amount of biased and sloppy journalism I read from even the venerated newspapers like the LA and NY Times, I'm not sure why the author assumes anyone should listen to the suggestions of their respective editorial boards.

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Because newspaper endorsement used to have more weight. I am not sure it has ever been measured scientifically but it was at least perceived as having some weight.

Now today, we realize that it has no effect on the average voter.

This is a shocking realization if your are a journalist working for a newspaper. It is a "Emperor's New Clothes" moment. For the rest of us, I would say this has less an impact.

The average voter does not read newspapers. This is obvious from the decline in circulation, not necessarily the election result.

Declining circulation doesn't mean they aren't reading them online.

Or that the people who read them don't have an above average influence on others who look to them for a more informed take on current events and the like.

I'd point to the uptick in online sources like InfoWars and Breitbart and Drudge as a sign of where people are getting their news. It's rare to see any of them link to more traditional outlets.

It's rare to see any of them link to more traditional outlets.

Which suggests you don't read either of the latter, for they do that all the time. Just go to Drudge right now and see the links at the top left to the NYT, LA Times, the U.K. Metro which I just learned about yesterday as an example of the MSM over there (haven't looked at it yet), The Hill (founded 1994 and pretty "traditional" nowadays), CNET (founded in 1994 as well), the Daily Mail, and ABC and CBS News. This is Drudge's daily bread and butter.

And for now, just take my word for it that Breitbart not only publishes a lot of AP, AFP etc. new wire stories straight, a lot of their items are short sections of traditional outlets with some commentary, links to them and encouragement to read the whole thing.

Eh. I think you don't even need to read the endorsements to understand that the NYTimes and WaPo were both heavily pro-Clinton. Chances are if you were anti-Clinton, you'd be reading their articles throughout the election with a grain of salt.

The funny thing is once the election was over, suddenly a slew of articles came from WaPo talking about how Bernie may have had gotten short changed from the primaries and how they may have affected the election, be it preventing him from facing Trump or dividing the Democratic voter base. Like, only NOW does this newspapers care about Bernie. A lot of supporters for Sanders won't forget the treatment he got from the Washington Post.

Plus, in the case of Trump, his anti-establishment rhetoric may have meant it worked in his favor to not get endorsements from the media elite.

The editorial page of the NY Times was heavily pro-Clinton (and anti-Trump). The news side was just straight-ahead, aggressive journalism, IMHO. As examples, they broke the story about Clinton's email server, which arguably was the biggest blow to her campaign, and had continual reports from the Wikileaks/Russian DNC release.

(I thought reporting the latter was over-aggressive. It was anonymous, uncorroborated data from arguably the most dubious possible source, Russian intelligence.)

In traditional news organizations, editorial boards and newsrooms operate independently of each other and it's unfortunate when high quality reporting is too often dismissed with a quick "meh, it's a liberal|conservative rag that can't be trusted." The "editorialization" by the modern blog-o-sphere has wrecked havoc on the landscape and sewed the seeds of distrust. I don't think there is any doubt of that.

I couldn't agree more. Also:

* Fox News and other Fox/Murdoch publications world wide claim to be traditional news organizations, but really are editorializing. Ironically, this undermines the reputation of real news organizations - people assume they do the same.

* Many on the right now value ideology over fact. Information that fits the ideology is accepted; inconvenient fact is not. Climate change, Obama's citizenship (doubted by 40% of Republicans, IIRC), and Saddam Hussein's possession of WMD are simple examples.

* The demonization of any information that doesn't fit the ideology has resulted in the right continually demonizing real news organizations, who report based on fact and not ideology.

I'm not writing that to be partisan. There is a critical problem on the right that is destroying society, democracy and civilization, and an attitude that they are not stewards of those things - as if there is no consequence. If it was happening also on the left then I'd say the same, but it's not.

The surprising thing isn't that the NY Times's endorsement didn't matter, but that the endorsements of conservative newspapers didn't matter. Many of them came out against Trump too.

>Because newspaper endorsement used to have more weight.

Newspapers also used to be local organs, owned by the local upper class, staffed with the local working class, covering news that people could check against their lived experience.

Nowadays newspapers are heavily nationalized and internationalized, owned by media conglomerates, and staffed with the kind of upper-class white-collar professionals who could afford many years of unpaid internships before getting a paid job. The information printed may even be veridical, but it's often not checkably veridical, so it gets down-weighted and mixed in with all the other uncheckable shit you read on the internet.

I don't think it is tone deaf. It is a very valid point. People that working politics and research it as their job heavily recommended one candidate over the other. It is getting easier to ignore the opinion of an expert and instead find a source that agrees with how you feel. People are looking for reasons to discredit sources that they don't agree with. Sloppiness and bias will always happen, but at some point you have to realize that a source like The Wall Street Journal is better than Brietbart and that blog posts and opinion pieces should not be given the same weight as investigative journalism.

As an aside, while the WSJ may have some credibility it's not that far away ideologically from Bretibart. In particular I was reading an article there recently about the Wells Fargo scandal and despite it not being an editorial the entire article was essentially a defense piece for the executives. By no measure was it even an attempt at even-handed journalism, it was straight-up advocacy masquerading as news.

Like, oh, this? "Wells Fargo Receives Laughable ‘Punishment’ for Massive Criminal Fraud": http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2016/09/29/29-sep...

Breitbart is most certainly not part of the Establishment that The Wall Street Journal is.

> heavily recommended one candidate over the other.

I think a big question about that is why they recommended one over the other. There's a lot of distrust of those recommendations, and speculation that they are recommending the candidate that helps their own demographic, rather than the US at large.

To be honest I think the wailing and caterwauling by establishment mouthpieces (NYTimes, WSJ firmly fall in this camp) probably only cemented the resolve of the average Trump voter.

They're very well aware that their interests and the interests of the owners of the NYTimes and the WSJ are diametrically opposed.

In theory I would like to agree with you that it is indeed a good idea to take the opinions of experts in to consideration when deciding on such complex issues. I suppose my disagreement lies in whether I can really consider many of these people experts when it comes to the motivations of poor rural white voters. The US in an enormous country and I think we are far more geographically, economically, and culturally segregated than we like to admit. Based on what I've read and heard from journalists in the week prior to, and even more so after the election, and I admit that I may well be wrong in my perception of the situation, I don't get the feeling that these journalists have any meaningful insight into the experiences of poor rural workers. This seems to be a growing problem where two very different populations, the rural working class and the more cosmopolitan urban dwellers, have very little interaction with one another. I think it can be very difficult to empathize with those you don't understand, and certainly very easy to demonize those for the same reason.

I can see how rural America might not connect with sources like the Washington Post and the New York times, but there were also recommendations from publications like Birmingham News and Falls Church News-Press. The local papers are more likely to understand their lives. The people going to the internet may actually be doing the opposite by taking in recommendations from national political sites rather than local editorial boards.

I also agree with how populations don't interact with each other, but it may be even worse than you describe. Even in urban areas, those in the suburbs seem to be more disconnected with those in the inner city.

Check to see how many "local" newspapers are owned by Advance Publications or Gannett.

> Does anyone else find this incredibly tone deaf

The tone is that a racist demagogue who made up lies off the top of his head at every speech was found acceptable by (almost) a plurality of voters.

The tone is that voters have been proven to be manipulable through fear to blame people of other races and nationalities for whatever economic conditions are unfavorable to them. The tone is that the truth and nuance of these issues are now irrelevant in elections.

The tone is that serial bullying and abuse of women is not a disqualifier for what should be the most-respected office in the nation.

Newspaper editorial staffs are not to be shamed for being disgusted by it. But yeah, there's no more denying the extent to which that tone exists now.

> The tone is that a racist demagogue who made up lies off the top of his head at every speech was found acceptable by (almost) a plurality of voters.

The alternative was what? A corrupt rich white woman who has been involved in politics since the 1970s, who has been behind the curve of history at almost every step (saying stuff like blacks are superpredators and video games caused Columbine and not getting behind gay marriage until a couple years ago).

> The tone is that voters have been proven to be manipulable through fear to blame people of other races and nationalities for whatever economic conditions are unfavorable to them. The tone is that the truth and nuance of these issues are now irrelevant in elections.

This has always happened. Why is it that when poor minorities vote for their economic well-being it is seen as progress but when poor white people do it it's seen as racism?

> The tone is that serial bullying and abuse of women is not a disqualifier for what should be the most-respected office in the nation.

Bill Clinton.

Your concerns are heard, but they'd be a lot more believable if the person who didn't get elected was not the face of hypocrisy.

I didn't vote for Trump. I just don't think simplifying an election about the economy into something about race or bigotry is acceptable. It's dishonest.

The working class has been gutted for years because of neoconservative and neoliberal views. Surprise - the class of people most rejected who receive poor educations and don't have a window into the modern economy have some unfavorable views on some issues.

> Why is it that when poor minorities vote for their economic well-being it is seen as progress but when poor white people do it it's seen as racism?

I don't have a problem with voting for or against a trade deal based on self-interest or interest in maximizing benefit for one's country.

Dehumanizing people with a different skin color who are already citizens of your country (Gonzalo Curiel, Humayun Khan) and cultivating racism and xenophobia to win power is unconscionable.

> Bill Clinton

I'd like to think that if he had faced election after the Monica Lewinsky incident, he would have lost.

As opposed to demonizing people for "clinging to their guns and religion" or calling people "deplorable"?

It's the same thing. Both sides are engaging in this bigotry. You can't write off almost 50% of the electorate (Romney's 47% statement in 2012 and Clinton's deplorables comment) and expect anything but extremes.

Both sides are doing it.

I'm sure people didn't like being called deplorable. But they weren't called that for no reason. They weren't called that because they were simply supporting a Republican. They weren't called that for supporting Romney or McCain.

Trump is a cancer of a person and supporting a man and the policies of a man who's openly transitioning our election system to one based on lies and racist demagoguery is simply, demonstrably deplorable. Relative to values like truth and tolerance that that we should share/ostensibly share.

Of course it was careless of Clinton to get caught saying it, but the deplorable behavior had to exist before she had a reason to comment on it.

I didn't like being called irredeemable as part of her "basket of deplorables" who "are not America". That's calling for my liquidation, a major thing from the cultural Baby Boom she belongs to.

And she didn't "get caught saying it", that was part of a prepared speech, and one she only later said she "regretted" saying, not that she was wrong about it.

You'll have to forgive me if my response to this is less than completely polite....

> I didn't like being called irredeemable as part of her "basket of deplorables" who "are not America".

Xenophobia, prejudice, and intolerance aren't what Clinton sees as America. If those things are what you see as America, that's your right. In which case there's an irreconcilable gap between you and Clinton and you need to accept that she's going to consider you as standing outside of those values that she has always taken for granted as broadly accepted.

Be the thing you want others to see you as, or else accept the consequences of being seen a different way. Don't be surprised or complain about it.

>Be the thing you want others to see you as, or else accept the consequences of being seen a different way. Don't be surprised or complain about it.

Nazi to the Jews: Be Aryan, or face the consequences.

Indeed, except, of course, the word "irredeemable" signals that it was just as impossible for them as it is for us.

To be fair, she was saying that to acknowledge to her supporters that yes, many Trump supporters are irredeemable as a preface to saying that many others are redeemable and do have real concerns that Democrats ought to try to address, or try to communicate the ways that they already try to address them better.

I don't think there was anything wrong with that part of that speech per se, though in the context of a political campaign it was absolutely a dumb thing to say, even though the sentiment was both accurate and aimed at encouraging reaching out to the other side. Someone should have known what kind of sound-bite that section of the speech was going to be cut down to and heavily reworded it so that wouldn't happen.

You expect me to personally give a shit that there's another basket containing people she thinks can be reeducated, when I and my family are in the basket marked for liquidation? Note also how that seriously personalized the campaign for us deplorables, clearly moved it to a "will crawl over broken glass to get to the polling booth"; existential threats will do that, you know.

Even if you don't accept my analysis of the coding of her language, how can you tell me with a straight face she was "encouraging reaching out to the" irredeemables? That's very specific religious language, per Merriam Webster "not able to be saved, helped, or made better". What were they supposed to do in this/after this "reaching out"???

And whatever happened to being the President of all Americans? Even Obama shows every sign of believing that, despite his looking down his nose on us bitter clingers, treating us as "enemies" to be defeated and the like.

That's why my family voted for Obama over Hillary in the 2008 primary (by then McCain had the Republican one locked up and Missouri has open primaries). Obama is no prize, but he's not a fraction as dangerous as Hillary and to a lessor extend Bill. We had lived through and remembered their first co-presidency all too well.

> You expect me to personally give a shit that there's another basket containing people she thinks can be reeducated, when I and my family are in the basket marked for liquidation? Note also how that seriously personalized the campaign for us deplorables, clearly moved it to a "will crawl over broken glass to get to the polling booth"; existential threats will do that, you know.

It seemed pretty clear to me that the "deplorables" were the side of his support that made him "not a nazi, but the first choice of nazis", ya know? Considering what trump was doing with his half-courting but no-I'm-totally-not some fairly disgusting groups and sentiments, and what she actually said in the speech isn't really out there and the qualifiers leave her comments accurate and even generous:

http://time.com/4486502/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorable...

I mean, she enumerated which part of his base she meant to put in that group, and allowed that some portion of even that part could be reached, let alone the ones who were not put in the deplorables "basket" and have legit problems with e.g. how globalization has left them rather screwed or with political corruption or who actually do want stronger borders but not because they dislike Hispanics (putting aside that she was a candidate especially unqualified to reach anyone for whom those and related things are major concerns—which is probably why someone as incredibly unelectable and also not terribly well positioned to credibly claim those sorts of positions as Trump managed to soundly beat her). As for "re-education", the language for the rest was pretty standard "these people aren't awful and have real problems and we haven't done a good enough job of telling them how we'll address those" stuff. "Re-education" is... kinda "we're gonna get herded into FEMA camps! No really, I read it on the Internet!" territory. Reading that "coding" doesn't strike me as reasonable, no.

However, though the speech wasn't inaccurate and the message was a good one to deliver to her base, it was really stupid in the context of this political race, and thinking it'd play well when cut down to a few words could speak to a certain arrogance which I wouldn't be surprised to find was very much present in Clinton and her campaign. Expecting any of the nuance of the speech, so central to its meaning, to be preserved was really, really dumb.

> That's why my family voted for Obama over Hillary in the 2008 primary (by then McCain had the Republican one locked up and Missouri has open primaries). Obama is no prize, but he's not a fraction as dangerous as Hillary and to a lessor extend Bill. We had lived through and remembered their first co-presidency all too well.

Aside from Greenspan maybe not doing enough to cool off the "irrational exuberance" of the stock market to make the later crash more mild, what were the big errors made by Bill Clinton's administration that made it worse than any other typical 8-year period in recent US history? I'm struggling to think of a recent-ish president who didn't have more serious scandals and blunders than Clinton. Carter—generally ineffective; Reagan—Iran/Contra and related were pretty awful; Bush Sr. wasn't terrible but got screwed by the business cycle and a too-public pledge to stick to excessively limited tax policy, he'd be a good contender for "not worse than Clinton" I guess; W. had Iraq which was ZOMGWTF bad, and his tax cuts were probably not the right call and left a giant shadow on the budget; Obama may or may not have been able to guide or halt the Arab Spring and related events to some better outcome, but I'm leaning toward "may" and will go ahead and call that worse than any blunders of Clinton's that I can recall. I think the jury's still out on things like permanent normalization of trade with China, which was probably going to happen regardless of whether President was D or R at that time, and besides, that was near the end of his second term and not really something you'd "live through" during his presidency, as if it made one's life a struggle at that time.

What was so unusually bad about the presidency '93-'00? Seriously curious, not a rhetorical question.

[EDIT] minor grammar fixes

what were the big errors made by Bill Clinton's administration that made it worse than any other typical 8-year period in recent US history?

His murdering a hundred religious dissidents in their home for starters? Their disproportionate viciousness towards anyone who happened to be in their way, e.g. Billy Dale, or committed lèse-majesté? To get on Obama's IRS shit list you have to engage in political activism and it's a nothing personal, just your group thing, it took way way less for the Clintons. There's lots more, which I'm not going to go into, for the simple fact is that I can now relegate the Clinton Crime Family into the ash heap of history.

As for "FEMA camps" et. al., I'm talking about the pre-FEMA period (when we still pretended to care about our civilian population surviving, my mother was in fact a Civil Defense Block Mother, I still have the metal sign), when re-education was a PRC and Communist Vietnam concept starting in the mid-late '60s (Cultural Revolution).

And if you think that's all horribly irrelevant nowadays, our current President launched his political career in the home of two of the most notorious of those engaging in the Left's beloved Direct Action, who explicitly planned to liquidate the roughly 10% of of the population they guessed couldn't be re-educated.

However, I'd say that especially with your takes on current history, we just aren't living in the same reality, and should keep our discussion narrowly focused.

Or just put it in the ash heap Hillary and Bill are now in ^_^, really, at this point what difference does it make?

> However, I'd say that especially with your takes on current history, we just aren't living in the same reality, and should keep our discussion narrowly focused. > Or just put it in the ash heap Hillary and Bill are now in ^_^, really, at this point what difference does it make?

Yeah, sure, that's cool. Thanks for keeping things civil despite the topic, nice, interesting exchange (not being sarcastic, I'll add, since it's sometimes hard to tell on the Internet).

You're very welcome, and thanks to you as well.

And, seriously, thinking about it, after today/right now! I should just steer clear of all things Clinton until the pardons are handed out, or not, and focus on the future. They've been "living rent free in my brain" for ... 24 years now !?!!?!!!!

Another reason I'm happy Trump put two political dynasties in the ash heap of history this year, add 4 to 12 years for the Bushes....

> not getting behind gay marriage until a couple years ago

And when did Trump get behind gay marriage? How is that a point against Hillary?

> saying stuff like blacks are superpredators

Thank god she never said that.

The Internet never forgets: https://www.google.com/search?q=hillary+blacks+superpredator...

Please, go find me the exact quote. This is the kind of fake news the whole Trump campaign was built on.

Calling violent gangs super-predators is not the same as calling blacks super-predators. Not even a bit.

And if she was referring to gangs of minority kids (as she was in context) is it at least a bit like it?

"But we also have to have an organized effort against gangs," Hillary Clinton said in a C-SPAN video clip. "Just as in a previous generation we had an organized effort against the mob. We need to take these people on. They are often connected to big drug cartels, they are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators — no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel."

Bernie seemed to think so:

When Sanders was asked by debate moderator why he called out Bill Clinton out for his defense of Clinton’s use of the term "superpredator," Sanders responded, "Because it was a racist term, and everyone knew it was a racist term."

If she would call nazis super predators no one would imply she's bigoted against whites.

To be fair. I agree she could and should have used better phrasing. I can also understand people like Sanders for criticise her. Maybe she even was bigoted 20 years age when she said that, or maybe she still is. But you have to interpret her words extremely uncharitably to infer that.

Here we are trying to figure out if here comments about gangs could be problematic while comparing her to Trump, who said this about mexican immigrants, not just mexican gangs: "They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people!".

>"They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people!".

The stats said that 1 in 4 women who cross the border illegally were raped. Trump was talking about the rapists, not all Mexican. He said some Mexicans are good. Some are criminals. And some are rapists. There is nothing racist about this.

A bunch of black people are saying "this is racist" so step one is taking what they say seriously and considering their point of view.

Beyond that: for many people, youth or juvenile crime is considered a failure by society, and lamented. Kids were neglected, went wrong, and we lost them to crime. When the issue is black youth crime however, their identity is pathologized and the perpetrators are subject to dehumanization through terms. "superpredator": these black youths aren't like Johnny shoplifting a comic book from Walgreens, they are inhuman killing machines that prey on the rest of us. "bring them to heel" this is something you make a dog do. An out of control mad dog, who needs to be corrected through force.

I don't think Clinton _meant_ it to be racist. Believe it or not I don't think Trump did either. But I'd say both of them said racist things in the sense that they both fell into patterns that denigrate and otherize minorities.

First google result contains it:

  "But we also have to have an organized effort against 
  gangs," Hillary Clinton  said in a C-SPAN video clip. 
  "Just as in a previous generation we had an organized 
  effort against the mob. We need to take these people 
  on. They are often connected to big drug cartels, they 
  are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the 
  kinds of kids that are called superpredators — no 
  conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they 
  ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to 
  heel."

So, no, it's a twisting of words. But not limited to the Trump campaign. Trump didn't call all Mexicans rapists, either.

But he did say that about immigrants. Or maybe illegal immigrants if you want to specially charitable. If he would said that about mexican gangs people would be less angry about it.

The stats said that 1 in 4 women who cross the border illegal were raped. Trump was talking about those rapists, not all Mexicans.

You can argue semantics of the full quote, but the only way you get to, "Trump called all Mexicans rapists" is: a) ignoring the context of the remarks being on illegal immigration, b) implying examples apply to the entire population, and c) ignoring the remainder of his remarks.

  When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their 
  best. [...] They’re sending people that have lots of 
  problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. 
  They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re 
  rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

If you want to argue pure semantics, you have to be concerned that Trump thinks Mexico is sending people, you should be confused about how "they" bring problems "with us", and stuck in a moral quandary about how all Mexicans in the U.S. are drug-toting criminal rapists who are also good people (maybe). You could never get to "all Mexicans" unless Mexico is "sending" 100% of its population.

Or, you interpret the remarks to mean that illegal Mexican immigrants are more likely to be drug-users, criminals, and rapists, with the immediate and explicit caveat that this charge does not imply to all illegal Mexican immigrants, because at least "some" of them are good people.

This good enough for you?

https://youtu.be/8k4nmRZx9nc?t=42

Do you have evidence that Trump was ever against gay marriage? I don't remember him saying much on the issue.

It's a bit tricky, I agree. Like with most of his positions.

During the campaign he said that he's against the supreme court ruling since it should be decided by the state. He also said in an interview that he is for "traditional marriage".

It could be worse, except that he has a VP who is a huge opponent of LGBT rights.

Trump has publicly said he will appoint judges who will overturn Roe v Wade. I expect that if he goes through with that gay marriage will also be attacked.

They will certainly be attacked but unless conservatives get a sixth seat in the court, they are unlikely to succeed. Justices are political appointees so there is some selection for values at play but they take their jobs seriously and vote across partisan lines much more often than our politicians.

Justice Kennedy, the conservative swing vote, has been supportive of restrictions on abortion but he has explicitly said that he prefers to defend the precedent Roe v Wade set. He even wrote the majority opinion in support of marriage equality. Even in controversial decisions like Citizens United where I vehemently disagree with him, I have to admit that he seems like a dedicated constitutional scholar that believes in preserving the integrity of the institution of the Supreme Court and the US constitution. His opinions are well thought out, are based on a balanced view of strict and loose interpretation of the constitution, and he takes his role as a bipartisan seriously so I think we still have a reliable firewall in the court.

Pence is rather anti-lgbt.

But you have to ask yourself whether any other Republican candidate would have an open homosexual (Thiel) on the stage at the RNC and whether they'd be caught dead doing this:

https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/carlo-allegri-don...

http://www.politifact.com/new-york/statements/2016/aug/14/se...

He's personally against same sex marriage, but he's not going to force it onto other people. They are free to marry whoever they want.

As a politician seeking election, he said various conflicting things. You can read into this what you want, but I certainly wouldn't consider it strong support for marriage equality:

WALLACE: But, Mr. Trump, let's take one issue. You say now that the Supreme Court has ruled that same-sex marriage is the law of the land and that any politician who talks about wanting to amend the Constitution is just playing politics. Are you saying it's time to move on?

TRUMP: No, I'm saying this. It has been ruled up. It has been there. If I'm a, you know, if I'm elected, I would be very strong on putting certain judges on the bench that I think maybe could change things.

But they've got a long way to go. I mean at some point, we have to get back down to business. But there’s no question about it. I mean most -- and most people feel this way.

They have ruled on it. I wish that it was done by the state. I don't like the way they ruled. I disagree with the Supreme Court from the standpoint they should have given the state -- it should be a states' rights issue. And that's the way it should have been ruled on, Chris, not the way they did it.

This is a very surprising ruling. And I -- I can see changes coming down the line, frankly. But I would have much preferred that they ruled at a state level and allowed the states to make those rulings themselves.

WALLACE: But -- but just to button this up very quickly, sir, are you saying that if you become president, you might try to appoint justices to overrule the decision on same-sex marriage?

TRUMP: I would strongly consider that, yes. [1]

[1] http://www.foxnews.com/transcript/2016/01/31/ted-cruz-attack...

This is the biggest irony of the article. Everyone in the establishment media is trying to figure out how Trump won without their endorsement without addressing the actual issues voters cared about. It even says in this article that people suspect that the media is biased and consolidated, implies that it's actually objective and fact checking, while also acknowledging that every editorial board supported Clinton and implied that the only reason someone would vote for Trump is racism and sexism. It questions whether Facebook is too powerful while acknowledging that the actual source of information on Facebook is people's peers. What it's really questioning is whether people are too empowered to talk to each other rather than listening to authoritative sources.

Michael Moore is the liberal source that I've seen most quoted by Trump supporters. He says the reason people voted for Trump is that they are sick of a neoliberal agenda which focuses on intervention in foreign wars and Free Trade agreements which seem to be little more than corporate protectionism. They're sick of policies which have been proven to increase wealth inequality rather than enrich lower and middle class workers. They're sick of economic uncertainty in a time of unprecedented productivity. Newspapers gloss over this and focus on racial conflict, which is a real problem that needs to be addressed, but it's not the whole story, and editorial boards which generally agree with neoliberalism are unwilling to question it with any depth.

The reason many people, including myself, look to xenophobia as one of the driving forces in the election is because I'm fairly certain Donald Trump would struggle to place somewhere like Belgium on the map and likely can't list the countries that border Syria.

He is so grossly unqualified for the position that it is difficult for me to understand what other reason someone would chose to vote for him.

Clinton was a poor choice for sure but Trump doesn't even pass the phone screen of the basic necessary knowledge for the position.

Edit: I should clarify that the point of my comment is not to reopen the debate about Trump as opposed to give some context as to why many people look to those specific issues as a driver of his election.

Huh, so obviously highschool students and college students who can't place countries on a map can't do so because they are xenophobes. That's a very interesting conclusion to make.

I would hope you wouldn't elect a high school student to be President of the United States. I would also hope that knowledge of basic geography of important regions in the world would be a prerequisite for a position that largely deals with foreign affairs.

If we completely ignore basic competency, then I must conclude his rhetoric, which largely revolved around scapegoating immigrants and the people of foreign nations, played a large part in the decision.

Edit: Again, this is intended to give context as to why some, including myself, look to those issues as a driving force in the election.

You mean how the left wants to ignore islamic terrorism and instead attacks Christians who don't want to bake a cake for a gay wedding?

Honest question, do you get most of that stuff from Facebook, email chains, talk radio or maybe another source I'm unaware of?

The BBC, CNN and similar. Especially on Islam.

It is not actually about what they report. It is all about what they don't report. Left wing and right wing propaganda are not the same. Right wing propaganda tells you what you must believe. Left wing propaganda simply leaves out the truth. Either way you have distortion but the methods are very different. NPR is not better than Fox News. Once you realize this, thou shalt be enlightened.

Let's take the case of Islam.

The working class is more religious than the middle class. The middle class mostly treat religion as a weird weekend hobby and don't really think the believers are serious. Deep down they think, these people are not being serious.

Well, I came out of a cult, do not believe in a personal God, and I can tell you these people really do believe in their thing. Belief is real, even if I disagree with it.

So when the working class look to Islam, they see religion and when the middle class look to Islam, they see politics. They simply leave out the religion itself. It is not about right and wrong, it is just that they are seeing different portions of the elephant. When a journalist is captured by ISIS he thinks he might get out alive by a ransom or prisoner trade. The working class understand he'll die because he is a kaffir. Do you see?

This explains the bifurcation between working and middle class perspectives. The worldview of the middleclass has no value at the resolution of the working class. I think George Orwell was one of the few middle class journalists who truly understood his people.

With the possible exception of Julian Assange, there are few working class journalists in the mainstream press, not even at Breitbart.

If you're honest, you have to ask yourself this question:

Which is the more likely?

That journalists were in a bubble? Or the entire working class? Look at the map of voting results by distinct. It is an ocean of red.

I see you deleted your initial response (I have cached replies that enables me to see posts that were deleted), which is fine, but I wanted to respond to three of your queries. To respect your deletion I won't quote from it.

1. Here I am using the colloquial meaning of the word propaganda, which is ideologically biased information, usually it takes the truth but then stretches it to breaking point and beyond.

2. I do not possess a Facebook account. I don't even have a mobile phone. I don't watch Fox News in case you were curious. I hardly watch any television at all since I don't have one. Many readers of Hacker News do not have them, it's a common demographic in geek circles.

3. Class warfare is a real thing. It is not an extreme concept, it's a descriptor. Europeans like me frequently complain that Americans don't grok class or that Americans conflate 'race' with 'class'. You don't have to agree of course. Perhaps America is the one nation on the planet that didn't gradually evolve a class system as it matured ;-)

Humour aside, I do think this (gradually evolve a class system as it matured) is one of the major reasons why many American intellectuals are increasingly interested in old European ideas and books from the 18/19th centuries. Their resonance is much deeper than it used to be.

I just deleted it because honestly, it's not like I'm going to get a real answer anyway. You continue to group people into baskets. Now it's "Americans" and "Fox News", race and class. I was just trying to understand where that comes from. Someday I truly hope to get some better insight as to where the general extremism is coming from. The reality is it's not going to happen in this thread so I was better off just deleting it as opposed to cluttering the discussion for no real benefit.

I think the answer you seek is in front of you. Look at it this way hiou.

There are the Lumpers (everything is the same) and the Splitters (everything is different). If you remember the book Sophie's World (which was full of great insights into this), then it is like the genres of reductionism and holism in philosophy.

The real answer is that people's brains work differently.

If you want some consolation, it is that we cannot live without either group, Lumper or Splitter. Each group has failure modes which can be corrected by the other tribe. I am convinced that is why the left and right exist in all cultures and times. It's a very important human algorithm.

Don't watch or read Fox News, don't believe anything in email chains and don't do Facebook really. I get this information by collecting large amounts of information from various sources. I see the ridiculous things that the Sally Kohn's of this world do to try to equivocate what happened with the Orlando massacre to the general Christian opposition to gay marriage. When leftists try to compare people having and voicing an opinion to the actual murder of fellow citizens, we have a problem.

A big real estate New York businessmen / reality TV star (certainly of the New York "establishment" for decades) entered the Republican primaries. Donald Trump was a nobody. Then, he started talking about walls around Mexico and banning all Muslims. This made him very popular in many places. This ended up carrying him all the way to the presidency.

That is a reason why there's so much talk about this. It's a mistake to think that this is election was just economics. A lot of Trump's support came from very well off people after all.

Having said that I do agree with you a fair bit. For a start, "racist" is a bad term. That implies outright hatred, which in my viewpoint is very minority; "cultural anxiety" is a better phrase to me, future insecurity compounded by tribal instinct. EG: It's not "I hate Mexican people", it's "Mexican people took my jobs". Those two sentences are not equivalent.

This too is not the only reason people supported Trump either (anything from nostalgia to agreement with policies to Hillary hatred played a role). On the flip side Bernie Sanders showed that non-culturally-anxious economics played well with many Trump voters too.

But that initial data point still is troubling to me. And it's less on the people that voted for him and more on the candidate himself. Trump was able to exploit this, and in the process made current culture a lot more toxic.

Would you call Romney a racist (and if so, why isn't Hillary also one?)

Trump got ~30% of the Hispanic vote, despite the Spanish media's immense negativity, despite the candidate's lukewarm campaigning in LatAm heavy communities. He also won more black votes than Romney and he won more white women than Hillary (a woman). It's hard to square what you are saying with what the results showed.

> racist demagogue

I don't think you understand. The very word "racist" has lost all effect. It is not an argument. It is not a disqualifier. It is meaningless and hollow.

If there is one thing the left should learn from this election, it is that screaming hollow epithets like racist, homophobic, misogynist, etc, are no longer sufficient to scare us, silence us, and cow us into submission.

Really? From my perspective those words do carry a lot of weight. And that a President of the United States, or anyone really, is ok with brandishing any and all of those tags makes me sad and really pessimistic, also determined to make those epithets count again, it's a line I will push back from.

All you're telling us is that, presumably as not one of the targets who's been told they are these things for decades, perhaps all their life, "those words do carry a lot of weight".

All we're telling you is that, as those who've indeed been told that for so long, those words are dead to us.

And I'd add they're word salad to the other side when used generically in a political campaign, with about as much semantic meaningless as Blue or Green in pre-Nika riot Constantinople.

Shades of Bill Maher saying, sorry about crying wolf over our telling you the Current Year Republican presidential candidate was Literally Hitler (although he should have gone all the way back to the first example in 1948), this time we really mean it.

Circling back to your desire to re-imbue meaning to them, I don't think you'll see that in your lifetime. See, for example, the hundred year cycle of progressive -> liberal -> getting back to but not quite there yet progressive. When words and the concepts behind them get burned like this, it's really hard to recover.

And, yeah, it's much worse than the surface which we've mostly been discussing this at, the very concepts have been rendered stone cold dead.

It might be my not being American, also not on the left, but what I am reading (perhaps erroneously) is: yes, "we" (you and GP) have been called racist, homophobic, misogynist, etc. for so long …and from being called those words there's no introspection as to whether one is perhaps factually so disrespectful of the basic dignity of other human beings that it would be decent to reconsider?

Maybe it will indeed be really hard to recover. Then again, my determination just got reinforced.

A very interesting analysis, but you need to add the time dimension to the issue of introspection, the boy who cried wolf example I mentioned (and, of course, in that Aesop the wolf did eventually come...).

Did I engage in introspection the first time I was called racist in this context? Yes, of course. 10th time? I don't think so.

The danger here, of course, is that having stopped outside sparked introspection after the message became perceived as a "Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, I think I'll go eat worms!" one, I of course may have drifted into it.

Almost certainly a bigger factor in the US is that this has been used to divide us for political gain, and now that we've become an polity where identity rules, it's anti-survival to continue to play by the old no longer operative rules. For a degree of automatic discrimination against other identities who are in direct, existential competition with me as a white, heterosexual male is a requirement if I want me and mine to survive the next few decades.

Call it racism (except, of course, We Don't Care), call it realism, those facts on the ground have to changed before movement towards your ideals can be realized in the US.

I still think that the media had a massive influence on the election - the fact that they all were pushing a particular choice (and attacking any discussion of the negatives of that candidate in an aggressive, illiberal way) tripped the public's Pravda breaker (they went into the uncanny valley of journalism?), and killed all of her support at the margins.

As for Trump, he won with fewer votes than McCain or Romney. The suspicion caused by the spirited media advocacy (the media being one of the only groups with a lower approval rating than Congress or Clinton/Trump) made people who suspected that they had been suckered by Obama into voting for the oligarchy were absolutely sure that they were being suckered into voting for Clinton.

The US media used to be better at this. It was the advantage that we had over the USSR.

As for Trump, he won with fewer votes than McCain or Romney.

Do we have any reliable figures for this as of yet? Preliminary ones, sure....

The suspicion caused by the spirited media advocacy (the media being one of the only groups with a lower approval rating than Congress or Clinton/Trump) made people who suspected that they had been suckered by Obama into voting for the oligarchy were absolutely sure that they were being suckered into voting for Clinton.

One, if not the key to Trump's victory was the Rust Belt, where the above analysis fits rather nicely with the facts on the ground. Whatever role a "Pravda breaker" played (I love the concept), the voters in those states that put Obama over the top in 2008 then voted for Trump 8 years later (which also does a fair job of killing the "they're racists!" argument).

> One, if not the key to Trump's victory was the Rust Belt, where the above analysis fits rather nicely with the facts on the ground. Whatever role a "Pravda breaker" played (I love the concept), the voters in those states that put Obama over the top in 2008 then voted for Trump 8 years later (which also does a fair job of killing the "they're racists!" argument).

Obama ran as a changemaker for the working class. Clinton ran on an everything's fine platform. If you didn't think that everything was fine, and you were at least mildly racist or honestly believed that Trump wasn't, you switched from Obama to Trump. If you didn't think that everything was fine and were disappointed in Obama, and you were black, or not racist at all, you stayed home. If you thought that the only problem with Obama was Republicans, liked to think of yourself as a cosmopolitan citizen of the world, worked in professional services, and were educated and eating good, or if you were one of the mass media-credulous, you turned out for Clinton.

A thing I've been amused by over the past few days is how clear it was that none of the print/internet media had any stories or analysis prepared for the possibility that Trump won. Like Brexit (or Corbyn), it simply wasn't part of their concept of reality.

You seem to be focusing on papers that usually endorse Democrats. Of course it is not surprising that their endorsements did not sway many voters.

I think that the important point, though, is that there are also a lot of newspapers that usually endorse Republicans, and far more of those went for Clinton this time than Trump.

Wikipedia has a nice sortable table here [1], showing endorsement, circulation, and who the paper endorsed in 2012. Sort it by 2012 endorsement, and scroll down to the Romney endorsements

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_...

I'd very much appreciate a few representative examples of sloppy journalism from either the LA or NY Times. Can you recommend a couple?

I don't mean to evade your request but I'm typing this on my phone while on a break at work so I don't have specific articles I can link to at the moment.

Off the top of my head I can give you some general topics I have found lacking in detail and nuance. The LA Times specifically has done a poor job imo on accurately representing some of the opposition to high density developments here in LA.

They also ran this piece [1] on Elon Musk's empire of subsidies which I thought was lacking in context. Disclaimer: I work at SpaceX so I'm obviously biased. There can certainly be criticism of subsidies given to Tesla/SpaceX, but when an article such as this makes no mention of the auto bailouts, or the similar subsidies given to the defense and oil industry I don't find it particularly balanced.

I've also found much of the NY Times reporting on Snowden to push a very national security establishment agenda. My apologies for not being able to give more concrete examples at this time, I hope you understand my statement was made in good faith.

[1] www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-20150531-story,amp.html

Look up just about anything NYT has written about US wars in the past 15 years. Up until very recently, NYT even had an editorial policy against using the word "torture" in reference to any act committed by the US government / military.

Not too mention that Maggie Haberman and Mark Liebovich (and probably a few others too that I'm not aware of) can be found in the Podesta emails sending over their articles to the Clinton campaign for review, prior to publication.

> Not too mention that Maggie Haberman and Mark Liebovich (and probably a few others too that I'm not aware of) can be found in the Podesta emails sending over their articles to the Clinton campaign for review, prior to publication.

Can you reference the source for this? I ask because much of what I've seen between what WikiLeaks tweets and what's actually contained within the email messages is severely taken out of context. (e.g. not understanding what news embargos are [1]) The New York Times were also the ones who originally broke the story of the private email server.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_embargo

Cryptographically verified, by the way: https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/4213

Thank you, here is also the response by Leibovich: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/magazine/anatomy-of-a-medi...

One example from Leibovich:

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/4213

And one of Haberman's stories being sent to Podesta:

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/51561

Here's a Clinton campaign strategy document that mentions Haberman and how she has "teed up many stories for us before and [we] have never been disappointed":

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3125945-Story-Memo.h...

Doing an advanced search on Wikileaks filtering by "nytdirect@nytimes.com" in the sender field, you'll see that the first drafts of nearly 50 different articles were sent to John Podesta:

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/?q=&mfrom=nytdirect%40n...

One more I found just now concerning Leibovich:

"Here is the quote that Leibovich is intending to use from your conversation with him unless we see a problem. I don’t."

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/33945

Thank you, I believe Leibovich's response provides the relevant context though.

NYT links are all paywalled for me, but I can't envision any possible excuse for what he did. I understand that "access" is a tricky problem and involves some moral grey area, but sending articles ahead of time for revision and "vetoing", and asking for permission to use a quote... those both strike me as a clear failure in journalistic ethics.

as a clear failure in journalistic ethics

To quote Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds, "Just think of the media as Democrat operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense."

Sean Hannity, Democrat operative.

So should journalists simply never agree to have conversations off the record?

I think there are big problems with the way access and coverage are mixed up together and traded on, but I'm pretty comfortable with a journalist agreeing not to publish remarks made during a conversation and then later asking to publish some of them.

Thank you, but in the second link, this appears to be a newsletter email from the First Draft blog on the NY Times [1]. The DocumentCloud link is certainly not verifiable as it contains only the single page.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/12/23/which...

You're right about those first drafts, my mistake.

That Clinton campaign strategy documents comes from, apparently, the Guccifer 2.0 hacks. Glenn Greenwald and Lee Fang contacted Nick Merrill to confirm the document's authenticity, but received no response.

https://theintercept.com/2016/10/09/exclusive-new-email-leak...

The one thing I appreciate from editorial boards are recommendations for the down ballot elections. I don't know who these people are and their goals are usually difficult to describe in a blurb. At least I can get a third-party blurb about why I should vote for them. Online doesn't seem to really have a solution for this, as everyone wants to write about the main event, not the local races.

I guess that's because in the UK "It's The Sun Wot Won It".[0] Summary: It is believed some media, like The Sun, have a big effect on elections' results, like with the recent Brexit referendum. This led some people to believe it's pretty much impossible to win against sensationalist media in the UK. (But please correct me if I'm wrong, that's my take after living in London for around 6 years.) And so Trump can be thought of as a surprise given his victory against the overall media landscape.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_The_Sun_Wot_Won_It

Why do you feel you should tell us you didn't vote for Trump?

I felt it would add context to the fact that while my vote aligned with the broader opinion of the LA Times editorial board, insofar as not voting for Trump, this was in no way based on their endorsement and I found it somewhat off-putting that the author would assume that their endorsement would make much of a difference to me.

[EDIT: I'm not the poster, but this is a real enough consideration these days I thought I'd provide an answer.]

Because in today's "cheerleader" style of politics... where it's more important what team you're on than anything else of substance... there is an assumption that if you say something that could be considered favorable to one "team" that you must be a member of that "team". The assumption that you're just being thoughtful, reflective and just considering the deeper questions seems to be off the table these days.

Clearly to attempt to limit the aggressive ad hominem that passes for discourse on the internet amongst the marketing-sensitive.

If you want to criticize Apple, say you're an Apple fan even if you're not, if you want to criticize the Cubs, say you're a Cub fan even if you're not, same if you want to criticize a Christopher Nolan movie or a policy of the current government of Spain. Some people get so steeped in a particular marketing environment that any hint of a contradiction of one of its axioms gets treated like a blasphemy that is sinful to acknowledge or listen to, and is responded to by marketing-dictated rote, not with thought.

Trump person: "I think it's good that Trump wants to get us out of TPP - why do people call them "free" trade agreements anyway when they add so many protectionist regulations on consumers, and only free capital and finance?"

Clinton person: "Why are you a racist?"

We currently live in a political climate where having the "wrong" opinion means that you are a bad person.

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