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Comment by tonyedgecombe | Hacker News Reader

The media were not SHOCKED, they expressed shock in an attempt to get more attention/views.

I really haven't seen much evidence that media professionals expressing shock at, for example, Brexit and Trump's election are engaged in some strong form of deception. There's a reasonable set of critiques about media incentives and behavior here, but I think this is a case where cynicism of this kind can obscure observable reality: The majority of people really didn't expect these outcomes.

The point is that the media were in a bubble where everyone they talked to had the same views as themselves.

That is absolutely a true thing you can say about the media and the election. They came to believe that Trump would not win the election, by being in a bubble where everyone they talked to had the same views as themselves.

But that is a totally different point than, and is actually logically incompatible with, the assertion that they privately believed that Trump _would_ win the election, but expressed otherwise to the public.

OK, that's fair. I think that most of the media believed that Clinton would win. It was actually quite creepy seeing all the glowing tributes to her life, and upcoming presidency. I still have a special commemorative edition of Newsweek from November 8, 2016, celebrating "Hillary Clinton's Historic Journey to the White House." I think I am going to keep this for a while.

As much as I would normally support this kind of cynicism, in the particular case of Trump's election, the media were as genuinely shocked as everyone else. Opponents and supporters, informed and not.

Almost nobody thought that was seriously going to happen. To claim otherwise is edgy revisionism.

Can't comment on the others, as I was not following closely enough beforehand to get any reading on the public zeitgiest.

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