Who was it who said "never ascribe to malice, what can be adequately explained by incompetence"?
The MSM came into the internet age at the same time as their owners started being hit by competition. The owners put the news staff on short leashes for cost reasons, and it took only a few short years for those reporters to basically never leave the building. You could do interviews via the phone and email, research on the internet, and bingo, you have a perfect bubble the journalists never got out of.
I don't know how many reporters and talking heads I heard say this cycle that they basically knew NOBODY that voted for Trump.
That's because they know NOBODY outside their hyper-provincial urban world.
Good post, Dutch.
The key element to understanding the problem is the deeper meaning of the "competition" you refer to. Competition, in the news business, means who gets advertisers' dollars. Higher circulation = higher ratings = higher prices for ads, which means more revenue.
In the days of William Randolph Hearst, owning a newspaper was as good as owning the mint. You printed money, not news.
Up until the 1920's, news was delivered thru newspapers. Newspapers didn't really get any real competition until cable news came along; then the internet came along, and BOTH the newspapers and cable news got shafted.
We're watching the emergence of a new news paradigm. Who knows what it will look like?
