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So, what did you talk about on Wednesday?

Our latest presidential election, with all its twists and turns and FBI investigations and leaked tapes and endless debates, has provided the American people arguably the greatest election post-mortem of all time.

Everybody has an opinion about Trump’s “surprise” win and everybody has at least one platform to express said opinion.

As I write this on Wednesday night the post-mortem has been in full effect about 30 seconds after Trump was announced the winner. So, let’s look at what, exactly, created the surprise win for Trump.

1: The media rigged the election for/against Trump

Either the media, as a whole, is a bloodthirsty cabal of shadowy kingmakers conspiring to anoint Darth Trump as the new Galactic Emperor … or the media just capitulated to Trump and, by covering his campaign in any capacity, fostered hatred and animosity unparalleled throughout the whole of human history and will bring about the utter devastation of our country, species and planet.

A secretive, omnipresent force controlling all you see and hear OR bumbling buffoons complicit in their own destruction. Just like always.

Screamers from both sides of this argument will tell you that almost $2 billion worth of free media was given to Trump before the campaign with only a pittance of coverage to the Clinton campaign.

Fellow Sunday columnist Robert Reich bemoans the glee with which CBS and CNN execs talk about how much money is rolling in due to Trump, no matter the political ramifications.

Right off the bat, that $2B figure? That’s from a group called mediaQuant and its an estimation for the cost of media exposure in non-advertisement programming, based on advertising rates.

Estimations are normally fine, but mediaQuant includes not only TV appearances or news stories about Trump, but also sources from Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.

Have you ever been paid to post on Facebook? I didn’t think so.

As for the cackling hyenas at CNN and CBS licking their chops at all the Trump blood money from advertisers: They’re talking about selling ads during the primary and the presidential debates. How hard must it be to sell ad space during a primary debate when you’re watching Al Gore calmly disagree with Bill Bradley?

It wasn’t destructive greed that filled the hearts of the network execs, it was normal greed; the kind that comes from making a very large sum of money on something you thought was only going to make you a large sum of money.

The single greatest argument against media collusion, for or against Trump, was watching cable news on Tuesday night.

The wall to wall coverage started early in the day and everyone from MSNBC to FOX was ready to call the election for Clinton. Weeks of polling and data analysis had foretold that, while the race would be tight, it would be a Clinton victory before the night was done.

Then the polls closed and the numbers started coming in.

Honesty time: I did not vote for Trump. I did not want to see Trump become the president.

But I will admit to thoroughly enjoying the on-air meltdowns as the collected faces of TV political punditry recoiled in shock.

Shock, not that Trump was winning, but that they had been wrong, wrong for weeks, predicting the inevitable outcome.

And this is where the echo chamber comes into play. We talk about the echo chamber when it comes to ourselves, talking with our friends, and assuming our opinions are shared by the larger audience as a whole.

The national media, cable news in particular, lives in an echo chamber too. As much as we talk about how MSNBC is too liberal and FOX is too conservative their corporate offices are less than a mile apart.

So watching these well-paid analysts and anchors scramble to figure out just how they could have been so wrong was, frankly, hilarious.

I don’t like watching the national media fail when covering a story, or cowering away from calling someone a liar when it is a matter of fact; to their credit there has been a recent reversal of that behavior.

But anyone outside the echo chamber, with an ounce of common sense, would have told you why all their data was so wrong.

How do pollsters work? There is a lot of data on consumer behavior available, normally used by advertisers to target ads, that can help determine political action for a large group.

There are previous voting records and new registration numbers from which you could gleam how voting patterns in a particular district may change this election from the last.

But mostly they just call people.

Banks of phone operators (I worked as one in 2004) call people from a list and ask them who they’re going to vote for.

So, imagine the scenario playing out to its logical conclusion.

Ring, ring, ring … “Hello?”

“Hi, do you have a minute to talk about the Presidential …”

Click.

THAT is why the polling data was hogwash, and it was a simple answer they couldn’t see for months ahead of the election: the Trump supporters were hanging up. So, instead of addressing that statistical deficit, the national media wrote them off as not factoring into the data.

Polls don’t elect presidents, people do.

2: Voters

Trump won because he got more votes, Clinton lost because she got less votes. Simple as that.

Why did more people vote for Trump? There’s entirely too much noise in the air right now to get a real answer; that’s going to take awhile.

If you don’t like how the election turned out, I suggest you vote next time. If you voted this time and still don’t like it, bring three people with you to vote next time.

——–

The national news media fell victim to the echo chamber and more people voted for Trump than for Clinton. That’s the simple, common sense reason for the outcome. Somehow I don’t think that will settle it.

——

Copy Editor Wes Burns is a Sunday columnist. The views expressed in this column are personal views of the writer and don’t necessarily reflect the views of the T-R. Contact Wes Burns at 641-753-6611 or wburns@timesrepublican.com.

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