They didn't "get it wrong" -- the goal was propaganda and emotionalism

Trump's decisive win on election night did not "burst the bubble" of so many people who thought they had "gotten it right". That assumes their goal was accuracy, insight, forecasting, and so on.

If their audience came to them for this reason, then their catastrophic failure would have rendered them invisible in the media. Instead, there they still are, rolling on with whatever BS they've been peddling the whole time.

Having tuned out the media for the past 10-15 years, I didn't know quite what the 21st-century media were about until tuning in here and there during the first election that has actually mattered in my lifetime. The old knock against them is that it's just propaganda -- outlining a narrative favorable to those with wealth and power, filling in details from one day to the next, etc. It's informational warfare by The Powers That Be against the people.

That's somewhat true, but only for CNN, whose anchors affect a sober and "just the facts" demeanor, and whose presentation is mostly pumping out key factoids and talking points from the Establishment (liberal wing). Of course CNN has been in decline over the years, and certainly during this election season and likely into the near future.

The other approach is emotional button-pushing and ego validation for the audience. The anchors speak and act with zero emotional restraint (not always spazzing out, but allowing bursts and long rants). They're trying to work up the emotional energy of the viewer, and build them up to a climactic release of ego validation -- this one quick proof of why your side is superior, or the other side is inferior. It's not the Establishment vs. the people, but one side vs. another in a culture war.

That's the approach of the older Fox News (which has mellowed out somewhat), MSNBC, and The Daily Show and its imitators. This is the genre that has gradually taken over news on cable TV since the medium began in the 1990s, when CNN was the only game in town and Fox and MSNBC effectively did not exist just yet. The CNN propaganda genre belonged more to the three-network era of TV news. I guess viewers figure they can get "the facts" from ordinary sources, and cable TV ought to provide more of an emotional high for what you're paying.

With that framework in mind, it's easy to see what role the punditry and the polls played in the election season. For the propaganda genre, they were meant to push the Establishment narrative that Trump and his platform were doomed, since what the American people truly wanted was Clinton. For the emotionalist genre, they were meant to pump you up about why your candidate was a great savior, and the other candidate was a vicious monster. During the primaries, Fox provided emotional highs to the anti-Trump viewers, while MSNBC hyped up its anti-Bernie liberal audience.

Now that those ends no longer apply, the pollsters and pundits can go right on making appearances in these media because the propaganda and emotionalist goals have changed to the post-election environment. Now the goal is to obstruct the Trump administration and amp up support for his political opponents.

So now we might get phony polls about how 90% of Americans want Syrian refugees to settle right next door to them, or pundits weighing in on how impossible it will be for Trump to get his way on re-industrializing the American economy by threatening tariffs on manufacturers.

True, these pollsters and pundits were liars and failures during the election, but we're not judging them anymore by the standard of forecasting election results. We're judging them by how well they manage to obstruct Trump from accomplishing his campaign promises -- and their performance there remains to be seen, so let's cut them some slack for awhile.

This applies to the usual and intended audience for the media, the ones who look to CNN for "the facts" or who crave ego validation and hook up Fox or MSNBC to their veins during primetime.

However, given the wide-ranging interest among the public for this most momentous of all elections, a large chunk of the non-news-watching public just got a rude awakening about how biased and abjectly clueless the media is. At a gut level, they already did not trust the media, but now they have something they can consciously articulate as the reason why they are not to be trusted -- look at how badly they fucked up everything about the election! Whadda buncha geniuses these guys are!

Having conscious reasons to defend your gut-level intuitions makes it all the more easy to stick with your convictions. Before, the general public (not the niche audience of cable news) might have felt awkward admitting to not trusting the media, as though they would be thought anti-factual, post-truth, etc. Now they can behave that way all they want, because they're convinced by real-world proof -- the pathetic failure of the polls and pundits about the most important election they'll ever experience.

Before, taunts against the media were unspecific ("CNN sucks"), whereas now I wouldn't be surprised if real-life trolls started walking by reporters shouting, "Who won the election, dumbass? Hahahaha."

Once Trump begins breaking up the media monopoly, ordinary people will be not just glad because they hate the media, but also vindicated to see total failure punished by going out of business. Sadly for them, the media still think they have high status ("Fourth Estate"), and are doubling down on how important, serious, and totally on-the-right-track they are, after having their credibility vaporized overnight in front of literally the entire world.

That haughty attitude will only make normal people cry louder for Trump to go "off with their heads!" rather than show any mercy. And it will help to solidify Trump's position in the recently blue Rust Belt region of flyover country. Will Minnesota go red in four years? It can if the media keep whining about Trump ditching his press detail while going out for dinner, rather than apologizing and showing humility in the wake of the biggest blow-up the media has ever lived through.

Please, keep it up, media!