Jeff Jarvis has a thoughtful essay on Medium about the failures of journalism in the campaign. Worth reading in full. This para caught my eye, though:

The idea of “balance” in any one media outlet has turned out to be as deceiving and bankrupt as the idea of “objectivity” — indeed, worse, for false balance is used to justify friction and fighting on the air and the damaging, uninformative scourge of the “surrogate” in this election. After helping to manufacture the Trump phenomenon, CNN actually believes hiring Corey Lewandowski provides balance. That’s not about informing the public. That’s not about journalism. That’s about producing entertainment.

Interesting article in the New York Times about a post-mortem conference call held by the Clinton campaign leadership. In it, Hillary apparently said that the FBI Director’s actions during the campaign’s closing weeks cost her the election. It’s not a conspiracy theory, though, because she’s not claiming that this was Comey’s intention.

“There are lots of reasons why an election like this is not successful,” Mrs. Clinton said, according to a donor who relayed the remarks. But, she added, “our analysis is that Comey’s letter raising doubts that were groundless, baseless, proven to be, stopped our momentum.”

Mrs. Clinton said a second letter from Mr. Comey, clearing her once again, which came two days before Election Day, had been even more damaging. In that letter, Mr. Comey said an examination of a new trove of emails, which had been found on the computer of Anthony D. Weiner, the estranged husband of one of her top aides, had not caused him to change his earlier conclusion that Mrs. Clinton should face no charges over her handling of classified information.

Funnily enough, in those last weeks — when Comey suddenly announced that the FBI was looking into Clinton-related emails on the laptop of the estranged husband of her closest aide and then, a few days later announced that the Bureau saw no reason to change its earlier view that Clinton should not be prosecuted — some of us began to wonder what he was up to. And of course conspiratorial explanations were raised as well as the usual cock-up theories. Comey is no J. Edgar Hoover, but still…

In a way, though, the most interesting thing about the Clinton debacle is the vivid demonstration it provides of how a modern, lavishly-funded, meticulously-planned, faultlessly executed, and digitally-delivered election strategy could be defeated by a campaign run by a contemporary version of a circus barker. The NYT report of the conference call makes this point well.

Before Mrs. Clinton spoke on Saturday, her finance director, Dennis Cheng, thanked the donors on the call, each of whom had raised at least $100,000. The campaign brought in nearly $1 billion to spend heavily on data efforts, to disperse hundreds of staff members to battleground states, and to air television advertisements — only to fall short to Mr. Trump’s upstart operation.

Donors conceded that, ultimately, no amount of money could match Mr. Trump’s crisp pitch, aimed at the economically downtrodden, to “make America great again.”

“You can have the greatest field program, and we did — he had nothing,” said Jay S. Jacobs, a prominent New York Democrat and donor to Mrs. Clinton. “You can have better ads, paid for by greater funds, and we did. Unfortunately, Trump had the winning argument.”

Of course nobody on the call was tactless enough to suggest that the failure might have had something to do with the fact that in a political climate fuelled by rage against political elites it might not have been a great idea to run someone who is, par excellence, a paradigmatic example of said elites.

I suppose — clutching at straws — one good outcome of the 2016 campaign is that it brings to an end the weird ascendancy of dynastic candidates in what is supposedly a democracy. Before Trump appeared on the scene, I thought it would boil down to a contest between the Bush and Clinton dynasties. At least we have been spared that.

I read a lot of serious newspapers — online and off — today, and in the end got tired of the whining. These publications are mostly written by and for the socio-economic groups who have done reasonably (or very well) out of the neoliberal years and it’s as if they cannot believe that this has happened. So they constantly repeat the long list of terrible downsides that will follow from this catastrophic election. But we knew about those downsides before November 8, so another recitation of them seems redundant. The real question is: what should those who are dismayed by the Trump ascendancy do now?

For American citizens, the answer seems obvious: focus on the mid-term elections that are due in 2018. We know from long experience that new American presidents generally get an electoral kicking in those mid-terms. Given that Trump is likely to make a hash of many things in his first two years, the chances of getting some rationality back into Congress seem worth considering.

For us in Europe, some rethinking is due. Top of my list would be NATO, which was allowed to engage in really pernicious mission-creep after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. What the hell was NATO doing in Afghanistan, for example? Given Putin’s belligerence, NATO in its original conception — to protect Europe from Soviet advances — is still valid. Trump’s scepticism about the organisation might provoke some useful rethinking among the European democracies who most need it — and who have clearly been taking it for granted if you look at the proportion of their GDP that they devote to defence. Kate Bush’s Joni Mitchell’s¹ great line — you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone — comes to mind.

Searching belatedly for a silver lining in this cloud, I’m struck by the thought that Trump’s election is likely to take the wind out of Silicon Valley’s sails. After all, Peter Thiel was the only one of the Valley’s oligarchs who supported Trump, and Hillary Clinton’s email trove is littered with the names of tech titans who were clearly part of the Clinton inner circle. And just as I ws thinking this, I came on a column by Andrew Orlowski which likewise sheds no tears over the Valley’s reverse:

Despite inflicting on people the greatest loss of shareholder value in human history, Silicon Valley managed to restore its reputation after the dot.com crash, but only did so because the political and media “thought leaders” were entranced and in awe of Facebook and Google. Google’s extraordinary grip on Government agencies has been well documented here at El Reg, and only took place thanks to Obama. Obama was even prepared to give Google something even Google was nervous about asking for – Class II reclassification. If it was good for Uber or Facebook, it must be good for America.

The tech oligarchs had an extraordinary ride of luck. Silicon Valley successfully disguised an attack not just on the heartlands, but the unwritten social contract. If you study Google closely, what emerges is how much the very idea of humans irritates it, what an inconvenience we are. “Post human” isn’t some sci-fi fantasy, it’s a reasonable description of a world in which many jobs have been automated, and the individual’s property rights and identity rights have been pared right away to the bone. People have begun to notice that Silicon Valley doesn’t create jobs or prosperity – except for the oligarchs themselves.

There are 3.5 million trucking jobs in the US, and a further 5.2 million job associated with transport. Trucking is the most popular job in 29 of the 50 states. How many will survive in a decade?

And the relevance of this? If Silicon Valley gets its way, most of those jobs will disappear.