It’s still unclear how Monday’s debate will impact the trajectory of the election, but one thing seems likely: The results will not adequately reflect the degree to which Hillary Clinton dominated.
Part of the reason for this, I suspect, is that people who didn’t watch the debate will be treated to (different) filtered interpretations. We are living in a fractured media world where different audiences seek and receive different information. We no longer enjoy a shared consensus. In this paradigm, the “facts” are increasingly subjective.
“You’ve got this list of polls [where] Donald Trump wins,” Sean Hannity declared. “You watch TV, Hillary Clinton wins.” Hannity was mostly referring to unscientific online polls (which really shouldn’t be trusted), but his larger point rings true: Either camp can point to some piece of “evidence” to plausibly “prove” they won. There are no definitive sources—no deciders.
It is ironic that this is currently being done to aid the ostensibly conservative side of the political aisle. As David Foster Wallace observed, this is “precisely the kind of relativism that cultural conservatives decry, a kind of epistemic free-for-all in which ‘the truth’ is wholly a matter of perspective and agenda.”
Back to the debate: We know that about 80 million Americans watched and that political analysts were mostly unanimous in declaring Clinton the winner. But, in a country of roughly 320 million, isn’t it safe to assume that partisans are the most inclined to tune in? What that means is that many undecided Americans will consume news about the debate, rather than watching it for themselves. In the old days (and by this, I mean eight years ago), this meant that the post-debate narrative largely hinged on which set of clips cable news decided to air ad nauseam.
If people allow media outlets to spoon-feed them their opinions, then nobody will ever really have to win anything anymore. At some point, this gets truly Orwellian. I’m expecting to see it reported somewhere that, in fact, the New York Giants defeated the Washington Redskins last week. (Don’t believe the false reports!)
It’s been a long time coming, but I believe that in the Trump era, we may have reached a tipping point where candidates no longer just “spin” the media—they can instead invent alternate realities based on diverse outlets and platforms. By utterly refusing to play the mainstream media’s game, Trump has declared: “Nothing’s over until we say it’s over!” And as a result, half a nation thinks he probably won.