The Listening Post

Trumped: The abyss between reporters and the reported

Political journalism in the United States – its spectacular failure in the 2016 election and how it got to be this way.

This week on The Listening Post , we take an extended look at the news coverage of the US presidential election.

Starting with the on-again-off-again, love-hate relationship that Donald Trump had with the news media, analysing the media’s over-reliance on the polls and looking at the abyss between the Washington press corps and the people to whom they were reporting.

We also ask how the news media will deal with a president who calls them corrupt.

In the second half, we dig deep into the history: the way the US corporate media were built, the regulations that went away and the legislation that paved the way for the creation of some of the biggest media companies the world has ever seen.