So why won’t the media admit as a lot? This is the tenth article in a collection that reviews news protection of the 2016 basic election, explores how Donald Trump won and why his chances had been underrated by most of the American media. Hillary Clinton would probably be president if FBI Director James Comey had not sent a letter to Congress on Oct. 28. The letter, which mentioned the FBI had "learned of the existence of emails that look like pertinent to the investigation" into the non-public email server that Clinton used as secretary of state, upended the information cycle and soon halved Clinton’s lead within the polls, imperiling her place in the Electoral College. The letter isn’t the one purpose that Clinton misplaced. It doesn't excuse each choice the Clinton marketing campaign made. However the impact of those elements - say, Clinton’s resolution to give paid speeches to funding banks, or her messaging on pocket-e-book issues, AI Art or the role that her gender played in the campaign - is hard to measure.
The impression of Comey’s letter is comparatively straightforward to quantify, by distinction. At a most, it might have shifted the race by 3 or 4 share points towards Donald Trump, NFT swinging Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida to him, perhaps along with North Carolina and Arizona. At a minimum, its influence may need been solely a share level or so. Still, because Clinton misplaced Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by lower than 1 level, the letter was most likely enough to change the result of the Electoral College. And but, from virtually the second that Trump received the White House, many mainstream journalists have been in denial concerning the influence of Comey’s letter. The article that led The brand new York Times’s webpage the morning after the election did not mention Comey or "FBI" even as soon as - a bizarre development contemplating the dramatic headlines that the Times had given to the letter while the marketing campaign was underway. Books on the marketing campaign have handled Comey’s letter as an incidental factor, meanwhile.
And regardless that Clinton herself has repeatedly brought up the letter - including in comments she made at an occasion in New York on Tuesday - many pundits have most popular to vary the dialog when the letter comes up, waving it away as a substitute of debating the merits of the case. The motivation for this seems pretty clear: If Comey’s letter altered the end result of the election, the media may have some duty for the result. The story dominated news protection for the better part of a week, drowning out different headlines, whether they were negative for Clinton (such as the information about impending Obamacare premium hikes) or problematic for Trump (reminiscent of his alleged ties to Russia). And but, the story didn’t have a punchline: Two days earlier than the election, Comey disclosed that the emails hadn’t turned up something new. One can consider that the Comey letter price Clinton the election without thinking that the media cost her the election - it was an urgent story that any newsroom needed to cover. This data has been w ritten with the he lp of GSA Content Generator DEMO .
But when the Comey letter had a decisive effect and the story was mishandled by the press - given a disproportionate amount of consideration relative to its substantive significance, often with protection that jumped to conclusions before the information of the case had been clear - the media must grapple with the way it approached the story. More sober coverage of the story may need yielded a milder voter response. My focus on this collection of articles has been on the media’s horse-race coverage quite than its editorial selections total, AI Art but in relation to the Comey letter, this stuff are intertwined. Not only was the letter most likely sufficient to swing the end result of the horse race, however the reverse is also true: Perceptions of the horse race most likely affected the best way the story unfolded. Publications might have given hyperbolic protection to the Comey letter partially as a result of they misanalyzed the Electoral College and wrongly concluded that Clinton was a positive factor.
And Comey himself may have launched his letter partly because of his overconfidence in Clinton’s chances. It’s a large number - so let’s see what we will do to untangle it. Clinton woke up on the morning of Oct. 28 because the doubtless - in no way certain - next president. Trump had come off a period of 5 weeks in which he’d had three erratic debates and quite a few women accuse him of sexual assault after the "Access Hollywood" tape became public. Clinton led by roughly 6 percentage factors in national polls and by 6 to 7 factors in polls of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Her leads in Florida and North Carolina have been narrow, and she was only tied with Trump in Ohio and Iowa.1 However it was a fairly good total position. Her standing was not quite as secure because it might have appeared from a floor evaluation, nonetheless.