With Midterms, Media Narrative Again Eclipsed Reality

The media's narrative-driven losing streak continues.

It was supposed to be a “red wave.” It was going to be a red moon. The townspeople, donning paper hats, were going to celebrate by painting the statuary red. Even the great herds of American bison had plans to thunder their mighty feet for rising red stars like Kari Lake and Mehmet Oz.

Except, not so much.

The red wave that terrified the media elite into a defensive crouch now seems to be nothing more consequential than a bit of margarita spilled into Martha’s Vineyard brine on Obama’s private beach. So what the hell happened? Well, the media happened.

For the past month, the media has been manufacturing red-themed metaphors to describe the bloodbath (there’s another) that was coming for the Democrats. It was going to be total and complete carnage—and all hands were brought on deck, meaning, on set, to talk themselves red in the face.

Call this the 91% law. That was the chance that the New York Times gave Hillary Clinton of winning the 2016 election. Oops. But the Times wasn’t alone in this narrative spinning regarding the candidate whom one magazine declared to be “inevitable.”

Of course, the media is going to mediate. And that’s fine. We no longer live in a 24/7 news world but in a 1,440 world—that being the number of minutes in a day. All those airtime minutes, all those podcast, all those tweets, all those Facebook rants, all those subreddits have to be filled with something. And when all the facts have been exhausted, narrative steps in.

We know that America is suffering from political division driven, to no small degree, by a trend of hyper-partisanship in media. But what we don’t often realize is that it’s not only the quality of media coverage that’s the culprit, but the quantity. Even water is a poison at the right (or, I should say, wrong) dose. So how could a million talking heads moving their fast jaws not swallow us?

What we need instead of opinionating are facts. And, probably, we need to get those facts not from the same people who do the opinionating, but from somewhere else.

At some point in the march of civilization, we realized that it was madness to have pilots fly airplanes without software doing the heavy lifting. It would now be unthinkable to stuff 300 humans into a tin can piloted by only another human without the aid of a complex computer. The same holds true for every essential aspect of modern existence, from regulating traffic to evaluating the safety of drugs.

But in this one regard, we insist on standing tall in our belief that humans alone can solve the insanely complex problem of gathering and correctly distributing the infinite set of emerging information we call news.

We need a better way. We have better tools. It’s time we learn to use them.