Good evening and welcome to this week's Media Watch.
It's been a week that has left many in the mainstream media more than a bit red-faced after Donald Trump, contrary to almost every poll and commentator’s prediction out there, became the 47th US president, wiping the floor with his Democratic rival Kamala Harris.
Media gets US election all wrong
Trump swept all seven swing states as well as the popular vote, leaving many who had listened to the likes of The Rest is Politics podcast host Rory Stewart dumbstruck by the result.
Stewart had told his followers for weeks that Harris would beat Trump “comfortably”, insisting that the notion we were in for a tight race – which is what most polls seemed to suggest – simply “suited the appetite” of journalists.
He said: “This won’t be a close race decided by a ‘couple of thousand votes’ … and Kamala Harris will win.”
Even in the aftermath, the former MP dug in: “If she [Kamala Harris] was currently winning, you’d have a very good answer for why she was winning.”
But Stewart wasn’t the only one. Many other legacy media outlets painted this as a tight race as polls mostly indicated a razor-thin margin between the Republicans and Democrats.
But Shakuntala Banaji – a professor in the department of media and communications at the London School of Economics (LSE) – said the media’s wildly wrong prediction was not linked to an overreliance on polls or wishful thinking.
She said Gaza had played a larger role than many expected, much like it did in the UK General Election when several independent candidates standing on this platform got in at the expense of bigger parties.
She said Harris had taken the wrong strategy with her own Democratic voters.
“Instead of being really strongly behind social justice and economic justice, she was trying to be conservative-lite,” Banaji said.
“And a lot of legacy media were just so relieved to have Harris there and to have an alternative option to the far-right that they didn't see how far right the Democrats actually are and how that does not please large segments of voters, who then either voted in protest or didn't vote.
“This would have been over issues to do with the economy, over issues to do with Palestine and the funding of the ongoing genocide.”
With media pundits like Stewart and Alastair Campbell – but also the wider mainstream media – Banaji added they were “unable to see their own biases” on these issues and imagined the US election to be a straightforward competition between a left and right-wing candidate when it was actually right and far-right.
Banaji also said legacy media miscalculated the Elon Musk (below) effect saying: “The legacy media simply had no understanding of the massive damage that the Elon Musk takeover of Twitter/X has had across the board in terms of the legacy media's own understanding of politics.”
Finally, Banaji said the media did not pay attention to religion enough, explaining that the anti-abortion rhetoric Trump championed radicalised many Christians against Harris.
Coverage of Amsterdam violence
There have also been concerns raised over the coverage of violence seen after a football match in Amsterdam.
Israeli fans were attacked and injured following clashes with apparent pro-Palestinian protesters after a Europa League football match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax in Amsterdam on Thursday evening.
Many media outlets and politicians have decried the violence as “antisemitic”, with some referring to the incident as a “pogrom” as Dutch police launch a large-scale investigation after gangs of youths conducted what Amsterdam’s mayor called “hit and run” attacks on Israeli fans.
But many media outlets have also been criticised on social media for leaving out important context about the actions of Israeli fans before and after the game.
Videos posted on social media on Thursday and Friday showed Israeli fans shouting anti-Arab slurs about the war in Palestine while there were reports of some tearing down Palestinian flags hanging from homes in the city.
Dr Marc Owen Jones, a disinformation expert and an associate professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa university in Qatar, told The National that - despite this information being out in the public domain – mainstream media outlets instead gave a “ridiculously skewed” version of events.
“Mainstream media outlets – from The New York Times to the BBC – uncritically embraced what looked like an Israeli government press release emphasising that these attacks were antisemitic and pre-planned,” he said.
"And they put these releases out without doing any verification initially so it gave a completely slanted side of the story."
The academic added that the “most egregious example” was with Sky News – who initially released a news report that was “kind of balanced” before retracting it.
Sky News claimed it didn’t meet its “standards for balance and impartiality” and re-edited it to remove some of the accusations against the Israeli football supporters.
