theweekmagazine:

America’s parallel universes

This was not a normal election. And there can be no normalizing of what happened here, no pretense that ordinary explanations suffice.

The creeping horror for many as they watched the electoral results come in was not the typical disappointment people feel during a political defeat; it was a realization that there is no overlap any longer in our scoresheets for what constitutes a leader — or even a decent person. Half the country either had no knowledge of the monstrous things the president-elect has said and done or else they simply didn’t care. The former is hard to believe, given the coverage Donald Trump received. The latter is heartbreaking, if true.

There is a third possibility: that half the country saw these things and simply refused to believe what they saw. Facebook and social media has flattened the distinction between information and disinformation. Even though his image was on video, even though his voice was on tape, many of Trump’s supporters attributed the facts to the “liberal media,” the outrageousness of Trump’s actions as “spin.”

Journalism cannot reach this world view. As responsible media outlets try to account for how every prediction went wrong, there will be waves of hand-wringing; there will be fatuous pronouncements on how “the elite” in the media failed to reckon with some deep unavailable truth about Trump’s supporters.

This is wrong. Worse, it perpetuates the error it seeks to correct by making the conversation all about the media instead of this transformation of the American electorate.