Liberal media bias lives beyond the borders of the United States. As Michael Wolff noted in a front page article for Monday’s USA Today: “Many popular media notions of what a restless electorate is against (bankers, corporate power, tax dodgers, economic austerity) and what it is for (fundamental change, leveling the powerful, taxing the rich and big social program promises) came a cropper in the British election last week.”
The Conservatives won a majority, after polls predicted they’d barely earn a plurality, and Labour performed far worse than forecast.
Wolff attributed Labour’s failure to the delusion of believing the news media:
Labour not only got the mood of the country wrong, but so did the news media. Indeed, part of Labour's problem was likely to have only seen its future, and understood the ambitions of the electorate, through its own favored media. The left-leaning BBC was wrong; the left-leaning Guardian was wrong; digitally centric Buzzfeed, trying to make inroads in Britain by targeting news to a young audience, was wrong.
From the top of the May 11 article, “Dems should heed lessons of U.K. vote: Labour, leftists and pollsters all had it painfully wrong” (online: “U.K. election: Painful lessons for Labour, leftists, pollsters”)
LONDON — Many popular media notions of what a restless electorate is against (bankers, corporate power, tax dodgers, economic austerity) and what it is for (fundamental change, leveling the powerful, taxing the rich and big social program promises) came a cropper in the British election last week.
Rather than endorsing this leftward shift in politics — a view arguably now animating the Hillary Clinton campaign for president in the U.S. — voters returned the Conservative Party to No. 10 Downing St. with a heretofore unimaginable majority.
It was, in Britain, a conservative revolt, an unwillingness to play loose with hard-won economic stability, or risk the gains, however small, that have been made over the last few years.
The Conservatives painted a picture of a country that was moving steadily forward in place. The Labour opposition painted a picture of a floundering nation that needed to be overhauled and rescued by new spending plans paid for by new tax-the-rich schemes — a view rejected in almost every way.
Labour not only got the mood of the country wrong, but so did the news media. Indeed, part of Labour's problem was likely to have only seen its future, and understood the ambitions of the electorate, through its own favored media. The left-leaning BBC was wrong; the left-leaning Guardian was wrong; digitally centric Buzzfeed, trying to make inroads in Britain by targeting news to a young audience, was wrong.
The American pollster Nate Silver, famous for his 2012 U.S. polling, also got it wrong. Conservatives, at least those in Britain, don't necessarily like to admit they are conservatives. And Obama campaign consultant David Axelrod, hired to advise Labour for $500,000 and offering a strategy of economic populism, was wrong....
