"...If you want a feel for how things have changed, think back to the role the economy, and news about the economy, played in 2012 compared to now. Back then, Republicans were just as invested in spreading doom and gloom as they are today, but they had fewer tools to work with. Mainstream news outlets still viewed economic data principally through the lens of horserace politics, but they were more or less on the same page about what metrics were important: how many jobs the economy created on net, the unemployment rate, GDP. Every month, journalists would wait on tenterhooks for the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ first-Friday report because they understood the economy’s centrality to the election. But when the reports came out, there was no sustained gainsaying of the numbers. If the economy created 200,000 jobs, and the unemployment rate dropped to 5.1 percent, that was the news—a boon for the Obama campaign. If the economy created only 100,000 jobs and the unemployment rate ticked up, a pall fell over the Democratic Party.
"Today,
it’s much less clear if and how regular people distinguish news media
from every other kind, and (I think by no coincidence) wide swaths of
the population believe we’re in recession when we’re not; think
inflation remains out of control, when it isn’t; think gas prices are
high, when they’re low. [snip]
"While we weren’t paying attention, Republicans created a politics for
the attention economy. Democrats are doing politics like it’s 1999. More
generously, they’ve built politics around the insight that “the
internet isn’t real life” and stuck with it for many years, even as the
assumption itself has become less and less true." -- Brian Beutler on the historical context of how the Democrats and Republicans conduct their information wars in the traditional media. Beutler goes on to demonstrate how, in the intervening years, Republicans have adjusted much better to the social media climate, whereas Democrats seem to be fighting the last election with the same tools. This is all absolutely insane to us, given the creative and intellectual edge Democrats have on Republicans, but that, too, may be an assumption (and you know what happens if you assume...).
