Trump, filter bubbles and populism: Washington media guru explains the US election to U of T audience

No matter how hard you try, you can’t escape the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It’s everywhere – on television, in the papers, on Twitter, Facebook and countless blogs. But how do you make sense of it? Marcus Brauchli (below right), a self-styled Washington insider and former editor of the Washington Post, gave his thoughts to a rapt audience at the Munk School of Global Affairs this week in a discussion with Munk Fellow John Stackhouse, former editor of The Globe and Mail (below left). Here’s what Brauchli had to say about the presidential race, the upcoming debate, the media and, of course, Donald Trump.

Why Donald Trump is popular

There is enormous support for somebody who will go in and blow the place up. There is such deep frustration among many Americans at the dysfunction of Washington and at how Washington treats them. People are willing to take a chance on Trump. Some of his supporters acknowledge that what he’s saying isn’t true but they say he’ll get things done. He’s going to go in and change the way Washington works. Their desire for change is so deep that they’re willing to take a risk on him, notwithstanding his near complete lack of expertise in the way the government works and lack of experience in Washington.

The timing of Trump’s campaign was perfect. He uses phrases that are aimed at peoples’ anxiety and uncertainty about their economic future, and their feeling that somebody else has got something that they don’t have.

Whether the media should have treated Trump differently

I can’t imagine how the media could choose not to cover Trump. If they started pulling back dramatically, there would be all kinds of questions about why they’re making decisions about what we should be seeing in our society. I wonder how you fact -check him in real time. A big question for the moderator of the upcoming presidential debates is going to be what happens if he lies on stage. Do you call him out on it? Should you challenge Trump every time he says something?

I do think that journalists should challenge misstatements and quickly. If Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump say something that’s a lie in the debates, and right there at the bottom of the screen, it has the reality, at least some people will see it and be able to judge it.

Trump’s mental fitness to be president

He has a very belligerent hard charging, demanding way. He’ll back off if he gets what he wants, and he can be very charming and engaging if he needs something. As Clinton said, do you want somebody as president who can be baited with a tweet? I don’t think he’s capable of controlling his impulses. I worry about that a lot if he became president. I don’t think he’s got the maturity and the wisdom and the patience of somebody you want to be president.

How the media treats Hillary Clinton

Clinton gets judged by the standards of a traditional presidential candidate. The media have gone aggressively after Clinton on some issues, and she and her supporters feel that they’re being too hard and giving Trump a pass for all his egregious misstatements. But the problem with judging Trump is that he skews so many things that journalists can’t keep up. But I don’t think that it’s wrong for the media to go deep on Hillary Clinton and challenge her on all the things that she’s done because she’s as likely to become president as Trump is.

Donald Trump, Rob Ford and the rise of populism

It’s not limited to Canada and the United States. You have Vladimir Putin in Russia, who is masterful and skilled in how he deploys propaganda. Rodrigo Duterte, the new president of the Philippines, is a very scary guy who’s prone to saying whatever pops into his head. The Chinese government increasingly says things which are not consistent with the truth. I think we live in an era when governments and people in power have discovered you can say things and get a following for them, in part because you’re no longer dependent on the media as the intermediaries, because you can go directly to people.

The media and Bernie Sanders

He got a lot of attention for a long time. The media underestimated the unhappiness of voters and they didn’t appreciate how large his base was at the beginning, but they caught on and they gave him a lot of coverage. The one way the media hurt him was that the media never thought he had a chance, but that was a math thing. They counted the numbers on Bernie and they didn’t think he couldn’t get it, and they were right.

On polls and politics

Polling has a lot of challenges today. Look at the Brexit polls in the UK. There’s the mobile phone problem. It used to be you called landlines, you knew who you were calling, and you knew where they lived. Now you call a number, and you don’t know that. Maybe the person’s moved from New York to Florida so you’re getting a whole different audience.

There’s a lot of polls that they shouldn’t do, including national horserace polls. It doesn’t matter who’s up in the national polls. I guess it’s useful for scaring people in one party or another, but the polls that matter are very narrow polls. You should be polling a particular audience that has to swing Clinton’s way or Trump’s way for them to win.

The health of the mainstream media

In the last couple of years, the big media companies – who have many journalists, who have a brand that’s recognized and respected by a lot of readers – have taken back market share pretty effectively by adjusting their metabolism, by having reporters who are filing throughout the day by publishing stories as soon as they happen, and not waiting until the next day’s newspaper cycle. There has been some stabilization of the legacy media companies – the biggest ones – in the market. A lot of metro papers in the country are still struggling, and I don’t think we’re finished by any means with the shakeout in traditional media. I think there’ll be a lot more that fall by the wayside, but not the big players – especially those that have deep-pocketed parents like the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal or those that have been agile in adapting to the shifting demands of the marketplace like The New York Times, and the big television networks.

The changing nature of the media

In the past, there were three national newspapers. There were three television networks.  So they all tended to provide roughly the same information, and they all clustered around the centre of the electoral spectrum.

Everybody was operating off the same set of facts. The nature of media has changed profoundly and people don’t draw distinctions among different sources of content. The media ranges from legacy mainstream media to more opinion driven media, to attack media to bloggers to people who make a living on social media. So today, voters are operating off different sets of facts.  

Social media has made it possible for us to live in communities of people who think the same way we do – the filter bubble. Facebook’s algorithms are designed to find content that you like, and if you previously liked a certain kind of content, it feeds you more of that content. People can feel that they’re getting a rich diet of information, but the information can all be coming from one narrow perspective. And anything that doesn’t align with their perspective seems somehow wrong. The result is that people trust only a few places.

I don’t know what this means for democracy, but I think somehow it needs addressing.

Nostalgia for old media

People want to bring back the media to the way it was, but we’re in a different world now. The biggest worry I have is not about media or journalism. Nobody is going to suffer from lack of information. They may suffer from lack of objective information because they live in a filter bubble.

I worry about what happens to democracy when everybody is specialized. We all used to read a veneer of news on different subjects because that’s what newspapers used to offer. Now we all read vertically. I read lots about economics and politics but not about other subjects. What happens in a democracy when people don’t all have the same information? They may be deeply informed on one subject but not informed on other subjects.