They still don't get it

Or maybe they do and just don't dare admit it

Interesting review by Nick Carr of a revealing new book-Trump and the Media

Media democratization and the rise of Trump

If there is a way out of the crisis, it may lie in Fred Turner's critical reexamination of past assumptions about the structure and influence of media. Just as we failed to see that democratization could subvert democracy, we may have overlooked the strengths of the mass-media news organization in protecting democracy. Professional gatekeepers have their flaws - they can narrow the range of views presented to the public, and they can stifle voices that should be heard - yet through the exercise of their professionalism they also temper the uglier tendencies of human nature. They make it less likely that ignorance, gullibility, and prejudice will poison our conversations and warp our politics.

Note-The "crisis" is the fact that Hillary Clinton was not allowed to become president.

When a journalist talks about "democracy" what they really mean is "mediated democracy" where Deciders and Experts carefully "curate" the choices put before the public.

PowerLine, where I first found the term, captures the essence of "mediated democracy":

We live in a political system that has not yet been adequately described, but one might call it a "mediated democracy." Mediated by a self-appointed, generally ignorant but highly opinionated "elite" that is not elite by any conventional measure-income, intelligence, education, social position-but that successfully dictates the terms of political discourse even though it no longer controls (exclusively, anyway) the means of production of the news.

(For journalists and academics to speak of Democracy when they really mean this bastardized version is truly Orwellian. Fascists and Stalinists can readily accept the form while arguing about where to draw the line between acceptable and forbidden opinion. A true democrat like G. K. Chesterton would laugh the writers right out of the room.)

Journalists and academics think democracy is in crisis because the voters - darn them - bypassed the Mediators and neutered the Deciders.

Here's a key point that undercuts the "Russia hacked the election" hysteria that has seized hold of the minds of Journalistic Deciders and Mediating Experts:

Keith N. Hampton, of Michigan State University, finds "no evidence" that any of the widely acknowledged malignancies of social media, from fake news to filter bubbles, "worked in favor of a particular presidential candidate." Drawing on exit polls, he shows that most demographic groups voted pretty much the same in 2016 as they had in the Obama-Romney race of 2012. The one group that exhibited a large and possibly decisive shift from the Democratic to the Republican candidate were white voters without college degrees. Yet these voters, surveys reveal, are also the least likely to spend a lot of time online or to be active on social media. It's unfair to blame Twitter or Facebook for Trump's victory, Hampton suggests, if the swing voters weren't on Twitter or Facebook.

This is something the MSM probably hopes we forget:

Trump's Twitter account may have been monitored by only a small portion of the public, but it was followed, religiously, by journalists, pundits, and politicos. The novelty and frequent abrasiveness of the tweets - they broke all the rules of decorum for presidential campaigns - mesmerized the chattering class throughout the primaries and the general election campaign, fueling a frenzy of retweets, replies, and hashtags. Social media's biggest echo chamber turned out to be the traditional media elite.

Related:

Journalists and Twitter redux

Why do journalists love twitter and hate blogging?

Why Twitter?

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