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“If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed. What are the responsibilities you all (the media) have? To tell the truth, not just to be the first.”
-- Denzel Washington
by Penny Lai
On November 2016, the presidential election of America shocked the world with its result. As almost all of the main stream media predicted that Clinton should be the one that wins, Trump took all the people by surprise. What happened? Were the opinion polls not accurate? Or were the media pinning too much on one side and ignoring the voice from other people? For outsiders from other countries, it seems like the America has gone crazy due to all the impertinent statements from Trump which had been broadcasted endlessly during the campaign. The image of Trump which people have received from the media made it hard to believe that an advanced country would elect him the President. There are few analyses that can conclude this phenomenon in terms of America election system and the information gap between city and suburb.
Everyone knows the American election system with the catchy phrase: Winner takes all. The political stand of every state in America is always consistent. Big cities like New York and California have always stand on Democratic Party’s side; while places where are considered to be more conservative, such as Texas and Arizona, mostly support the Republican Party. And there is one exception: Florida, the swing state, which does not have a solid political position. In this election, Florida was considered the crucial point to Trump’s triumph. However, dose this election system of America really reflect people’s voice? Perhaps this system fails to serve the people good and, worse still, injustice to some candidates. Because the popular votes, the total votes from the people, not electors, shows the voice clear and loud. Hillary Clinton won 48 % of the popular vote to Trump’s 42%, which outpaced him by almost 2.9 million votes. American were not crazy, they just got tricked by the election system.
Still, Trump had won a good amount of the popular votes. This means a huge portion of the voting population supported him even after all the controversial statements he made. There are several reasons to that and one of the biggest and most successful one is that he knows what the people from outside of the internationalized cities want. States like New York and California are true mixing pots of the world. And citizens in those cities have perspectives that are more liberal and internationalized. However, states that are in more suburban areas are more conservative compared to the world-famous states. People in those places might think that America is going down because of the immigrants and the Muslims. They think that the Americans are losing their jobs because going into America is too easy and people from other countries take all the opportunities away. This widespread view can be attributed to the result of information gap. And Trump seizes their hearts with all the extreme statements he made, though they were considered to be sexist, racist, or homophobic by the world.
For sure this election concerns more issues than just the system of voting and information gap; however, there are the two major points. People can easily be deceived by the media if they do not try to gather more information on their own and think independently. Now is the time when the technology develops faster than the speed of the bullets. It goes without saying that the media plays a role that is more important than ever. And from this American election, it is not hard to see the impartiality of each medium. It is not wrong to take a stance, but when the media are reporting information to people, no matter how impertinent a candidate is, the media should always stay just and true. Because this not only influences the decent publicity, but also affects the minds and conceptions of the audiences.
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