The biggest story from the Iowa Caucus wasn’t about Trump. It was about media, and how their glib herd mentality massively skews our perceptions and drives our politics.
Look at how the major news outlets (the NYT, WaPo, Politico, AP, etc.) uniformly called Trump’s Iowa win “decisive,” “an early knockout,” a “commanding” victory in which he “conquered.”
Wait, what?
Donald Trump is, for all intents and purposes, running as the incumbent—quite literally; an astounding two-thirds of Iowa caucus-goers believes he is the legitimate President—yet despite the massive popularity he is supposed to enjoy among the Republican “base,” he got barely half their vote. Half.
And that’s… impressive?
Or, consider the fact that there are 719,000 registered republicans in Iowa, and only 56,000—a scant 8 percent—were motivated enough to show up and vote for Trump. And it wasn’t the winter weather; real Iowans laugh when out-of-state reporters suggest that cold weather would keep them from popping down the street to a church basement to caucus. Consider that an almost equal number were motivated to show up and vote against him. And that’s the media’s “stunning show of strength?”
Try this thought experiment: What if Joe Biden had gotten only half the votes of caucus-goers in Iowa. What would the headlines say? “Commanding victory”? Not on your life. How about a million thesaurus searches for variations on “Biden stumbles?”
Former President Donald Trump speaks at his caucus night event at the Iowa Events Center on January 15, 2024 in Des Moines, Iowa. Trump secured a dominant win and secured the majority of college-educated voters, according to exit polls.
Chip Somodevilla/GETTY IMAGES
So it would have been equally legitimate for our media friends to lead their stories this morning by breathlessly describing the same Trump wobbliness that they would have attached to Biden: that far from a “knockout,” managing to get only half of the most motivated, consistent, reliable Republicans from the MAGA heartland to vote for him over a pu pu platter of alternatives is an alarming sign of weakness.
How about headlining “Trump Falters As Half of Republicans Turn Against Him” or “Questions Fly as Trump Barely Clears 50 Percent in Iowa?”
All of which shows how badly we’ve been gaslit into thinking about media “bias” all wrong. You can ignore Fox News’ motivated whining about “liberal media bias.” Studies confirm that there is no such thing; if anything, having a rightwing media that acts as full-time cheerleaders for Republicans and the rest of media that doesn’t means that Democrats on the whole have it far worse.
There is, rather, such a thing as editors shaping stories to fit social trends, shamelessly pandering to political parties to maintain “access,” and being downright lazy by spouting surface-level descriptions like WaPo’s “Donald Trump romped to a decisive victory” that don’t survive a single click below the surface for critical thinking.
Here’s such a click. ABC News found last night that by a split of 63-32 percent, respondents to their entrance poll said they’d consider Trump fit for office “despite a conviction” on one of the 91 felony counts pending against him.
So, one-third of the country’s most dedicated core of Republican base voters say that they will abandon Trump if he loses any of these cases, a breathtaking vulnerability for a candidate. And this nugget is not only buried inside an article about his political strength titled “Trump trounces in Iowa,” but is also constructed so as to suggest that this is a sign of how devoted his support is?
Or how about the findings in that very same article that in Iowa, Trump only managed 42 percent support among independents, 34 percent among voters under age 45, only 56 percent among voters over 45, and a paltry 20 percent among moderates? Again, try attaching those numbers to President Biden in your mind and imagine how the stories would read.
They say politics makes strange bedfellows, and right now, Sarah Palin’s criticism of the “lamestream media” is sitting one pillow over.
All of this matters even more than usual in the coming weeks, as Republican voters make critical decisions based in large part on what they are seeing and reading. As the Bard wrote, “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
The media decided in their echo chamber that Iowa was good for Trump. Hence it will be good. They would have been equally justified in saying it was bad. And it would have been. Their choice… but the rest of us have to live in the self-fulfilling prophesy world they create.
We truly face an inflection point. There is no realistic scenario where Trump will be stopped by Republicans unless Nikki Haley is perceived as succeeding in New Hampshire next week, and therefore viable. And the media will decide that in their coverage.
As the former chief of staff for a New Hampshire Congressman and a veteran of New Hampshire campaigns, I can attest that the kind of New Hampshire campaigning that exists in the popular mind—small town halls, diners, angry dairy farmers—does exist, but it is conducted almost entirely as a Potemkin Village setup for the media’s benefit, meant to hook fawning stories like this one about New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu knocking on doors for Nikki Haley (as soon as the reporter left, I can promise that Sununu did, too). Because the campaigns know that the media will ultimately drive the outcome, no matter how many diner handshakes their candidates perform.
We should all prefer that the media achieve the Platonic ideal of objectivity. But since they can’t, or won’t, we must hope for the next best thing: wisdom. Because our fates may hang in their imbalance.
Matt Robison is a writer, podcast host, and former congressional staffer.
The views in this article are the writer’s own.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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