Legacy media has certain tropes that it falls back on frequently, no matter what’s going on in the real world. One is “Democrats in disarray.” It shows up all the time. Four years ago, it led news giants to make wildly wrong predictions about what would happen in the midterm elections.
Another trope could be thought of as the polar opposite: “Americans would never vote for this Republican.” That one usually happens when the media focuses on individuals, particularly in presidential races, rather than focusing on parties. The biggest example is the 2016 presidential race, when Trump shocked the establishment by winning the Electoral College. Something similar happened in 2024, when parts of the media thought Vice President Kamala Harris might even carry Iowa. (She lost not only Iowa but all of the so-called swing states as well.)
These cases are important to keep in mind now. With the midterms less than two months away, Americans are likely to find themselves on an emotional rollercoaster, filled with hopes and fears. Many can’t help but look to Big Media for indications of what might happen.
So on They Stand Corrected, my podcast and newsletter fact checking the news, I brought in a guest to help everyone see the futility of counting on the media to predict anything.
Historically, the party inside the White House has generally taken a big hit in midterms -- what President Barack Obama called a “shellacking.” Combine that with the “disarray” trope, and the media was set for the same thing to happen in 2022. Instead, Democrats had historic success.
USA Today humor columnist Rex Huppke looked back on what the media had said in the lead-up. “The wrongness of the pundits prior to Election Day was staggering,” he wrote. Declaring a CNN pundit at the time, Chris Cillizza, “the most regularly wrong person of all time,” Huppke pointed to these headlines on Cillizza’s columns: “Why the midterms are going to be great for Donald Trump,” “Why Republican attacks on crime have been so devastating for Democrats,” and “The bottom is dropping out of the 2022 election for Democrats.”
Of course, it wasn’t just CNN, my old stomping grounds. “If you weren’t paying attention to the men on television who get paid large sums of money to be incorrect, you might have missed their incessant, supremely confident and wildly wrong predictions,” Huppke wrote.
Why does this happen? In our interview, Huppke cited the availability of so much polling these days. “It’s almost like a toy that people feel like they have to play with.” He also noted the problem of “clout chasing.” Pundits see their predictions perform well on social media among people who want those predictions to come true.
Of course, news agencies need to prepare for possible eventualities. That’s how the infamous “Dewey Defeats Truman” cover of the Chicago Tribune happened in 1948. But having reports ready to go based on different potential outcomes is a far cry from acting like Nostradamus.
The shamelessness about making predictions also speaks to a larger problem beyond just political coverage: a profound lack of humility about what is unknown. News giants move beyond facts all the time, declaring things they’re in no position to declare. This is a big source of them getting so much wrong so frequently -- like claiming to know what “any” military expert would say or declaring what the “mood” is among millions of people.
Huppke has a line he’s been using “throughout the Trump years: ‘Make stupidity embarrassing again.’ There was a time when it used to be embarrassing to be that wrong, or embarrassing to say something that was just patently ridiculous or just uninformed. That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.
“It seems like it’s really easy — whether you’re a pundit, whether you’re a politician, or whether you’re Trump himself — to say things that are just objectively absurd and incredibly wrong, and say them with great confidence, and then just move on to the next thing. And that is a terrible place for us to be in terms of journalism as an institution. It’s also, just as a country, not good.”
He’s right. So as the midterms approach, beware the reading of tea leaves. Just like the rest of us, the media has no clue what’s going to happen.
Josh Levs is host of They Stand Corrected, the podcast and newsletter fact-checking the media. Find him at joshlevs.com.
Thanks for running this column, The Contrarian. The media's pseudo-omniscience is a big part of the problem! Hear more from the interview in Episode 111, Moderation Mandate. And share thoughts, questions, etc. over at https://theystandcorrected.substack.com/
Polling is only a snapshot of time. What happens in 6 months is a different story. Our 2017 senate race in Alabama is a prime example.