US Politics 2022: Can the Media be Trusted?

Today, more than ever before, US politics is intertwined with media, from legacy print publications and broadcast networks through social media platforms. This has led to competing, poll-driven narratives--especially at election time. Despite the wealth of data, however, experts consistently get things wrong. The latest example is the 2022 midterm elections when the predicted "red wave" never materialized. The stakes will be even higher in the presidential election of 2024--with Donald Trump as an announced candidate. Why does US politics remain so hard to analyze and interpret--and what can be done to clarify the picture at this critical moment?  

 

Sam Tanenhaus, visiting professor at St. Michael’s College and the Munk School, is a historian and journalist. The former editor in chief of the New York Times Book Review, he has also been a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, writing feature articles on politics and culture. His books include Whittaker Chambers (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, shortlisted for both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize; and a national best seller) and The Death of Conservatism (New York Times Best Seller and one of The New Yorker’s “100 Favorite Books” of 2009). His articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Atlantic, Esquire, Time, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and many other publications in the United States and abroad. He has taught at the New School for Social Research and City University of New York and lectured at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and New York University as well as at the White House and at the Clinton, Kennedy, and Johnson Presidential libraries, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and the Sun Valley Writers Conference. He is currently completing a biography of William F. Buckley Jr.