The Federalist senior editor Mollie Hemingway joined “Media Buzz” on Fox News Sunday morning to discuss whether the press can win back public trust after predicting and covering 2016 so badly.
“Many people in the media are pushing a narrative rather than just reporting the facts, and frequently they get the narrative wrong,” Hemingway said. “In the case of the 2016 election coverage I think we saw that pushing narratives, which everybody agreed on, didn’t help out our larger profession,” she said. “It really caused a real breakdown in trust with people because they could see that people were just pushing ideas, telling people what to think, rather than listening what they had to say.”
Hemingway noted the demise of local news and larger outlets shuttering their local bureaus has negatively affected media’s coverage, particularly in political news.
“It really affected our ability to understand what was happening in the country this year. It did nobody a service to have everybody in these elite echo chambers,” she said. “No objective viewer could be confused about how much the media were helping Hillary Clinton along, how they were downplaying her scandals and her problems, and again how they reacted very dramatically to every single thing that happened with Donald Trump — making huge issues of things that might not be a huge issues in the minds of voters.”
“I really thought that after the election you would see all these people really looking inward and saying ‘What did we do? How did we mess up so much?'” Hemingway said. “But there weren’t that many reflections. There were a few here and there, but we haven’t seen any changes. . . we’ve seen a lot of doubling down on what they got wrong.”
