@awcntdb : As it happens, I am quite familiar with rural Pennsylvania, I spent time there in the “T” not long before the election, and I had no doubts about what people there thought. The thing is, they thought all those thoughts before, too. James Carville described Pennsylvania over 30 years ago as “Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Alabama in between.” That’s not entirely fair, but it gets repeated all the time, and no one doubts that it describes something true about Pennsylvania politics. I am also reasonably familiar with Pennsylvania politics, and for the past 30 years it has essentially been the case that the four suburban counties in southeastern Pennsylvania determine the outcome of statewide elections. I doubt that anyone engaged in Pennsylvania politics, being told that Hillary Clinton would exceed Obama’s 2012 margins in Philadelphia and its suburbs and Pittsburgh, would have bet that Trump could nonetheless win the state. Nothing like that has happened here in living memory. So I can’t blame other people too much for thinking that it wouldn’t happen this year, either.
(By the way, as far as I can tell “shy Trump syndrome” had nothing to do with it. Trust me, people in Central Pennsylvania were not shy about their support for Trump; if anything, there was probably social pressure on Clinton supporters not to identify themselves. In Philadelphia and Montgomery County, people might have had concerns about being judged for supporting Trump, but nothing about the election results suggested he had more depth of support there than the polls had indicated. What the polls got wrong, mostly, was what percentage of the people in rural districts who said they planned to vote would actually vote.)
I spent Election Day on the street in a multi-ethnic, tough, working class neighborhood. People were joyous about voting, and they voted overwhelmingly for Clinton, no matter what their ethnicity. In the precincts I covered, she got the same percentage of the vote Obama had in 2012 (when he won the state handily), 85-90%, with slightly larger turnout. There was no evidence of an organized effort to get out the Trump vote anywhere. Only two out of 12 polling places in the neighborhood had so much as someone standing outside with a Trump sign, and one of those people – a self-proclaimed Sanders supporter from outside the neighborhood who was aggressively trying to pick fights – got tired and left before noon. I didn’t hear or see any news reports all day, and I finished my work after 9:00 pm completely confident that Clinton had won Pennsylvania. Obviously, I was wrong, but I was wrong based on my own experience, not because I was paying attention to the mainstream media.
Anyway, facts are facts. We know them via the media, of course, but there is generally lots of independent confirmation, and when there isn’t we find out about it. When someone says, “I donated $6 million to this charity,” and there are records that he only donated $2 million, that’s a problem with facts. You can complain with the media deciding that’s important enough to report, or with not pointing out that $2 million was a very generous, impressive contribution, but the media isn’t setting itself up as an arbiter of facthood by reporting that discrepancy.
I think I understand from your post that what you refer to as the mainstream media is mainly talking heads and commentators. Since I don’t watch those shows or pay attention to social media talking about those shows, I don’t really know whether I should defend them or not. Donna Brazile is not a reporter, she’s a personality representing a team. Please don’t tell me anyone thinks otherwise.