Donald Trump at an election night event in Florida. Photo: AFP / Jim Watson
"What are we learning about America as we see these numbers?" the BBC's Nuala McGovern asked a deflated Democratic Party pollster last Wednesday, near the end of the BBC's eight-hour global broadcast America Decides.
"I don't know anymore," she said, before breaking into nervous, bitter laughter.
"Democrats, and maybe Republicans too, need to do some soul-searching about what it says about America that we are willing to probably re-elect a man with 34 felony convictions and not look at the economic picture," she said when she recovered her poise.
"What does that mean about what we're willing to put up with and willing to put into the highest office in the land?" she added.
The news media were asking themselves those questions too.
In the NBC News wrap-up, the main anchors reckoned Trump's criminal convictions and inciting a violent insurrection had ended up being an electoral asset for the Republicans - while pointing out that those things were bad was a mistake by their opponents.
"That might have been the biggest political miscalculation in this country's history," Tom Llamas said.
In his victory speech, the president-elect called the media "the enemy camp" - and not for the first time.
And Trump will have more power than ever as president this time.
'Trump wins, the press loses' was the stark verdict of the Columbia Journalism Review.
It cited the prospect of greater surveillance of journalists, politicised regulation of media companies and broadcast licences, more limited access to the White House, more leak investigations, and even the potential indictment of journalists on espionage charges.
Whatever happened to not buying a fight with those who buy ink by the barrel?
John Allsop edits The Media Today, a daily newsletter from the Columbia Journalism Review. Photo:
"It's tempting to conclude that it's their media world now and that we all just live in it," John Allsop, the editor of the CJR's daily newsletter The Media Today, wrote on Wednesday, noting that podcasters and social media influencers boosted Trump's campaign.
"Indeed, it's tempting to conclude a lot of things this morning - including about the supposed obsolescence and out-of-touchness of the traditional mainstream media. And some already have."
A pre-occupation with prediction?
"American election coverage is like no other country on Earth that I've experienced in terms of just how long it goes on for. It goes on for months and months and months," Allsop told Mediawatch.
"Polls are intensely, intensely followed - and read out almost like the weather forecast at the beginning of major TV shows. Sections of political newsletters are devoted to just running down the latest numbers. And this goes on for ages.
"I just think it's a desperately uninsightful and speculative way to cover something where the stakes are so huge and where there's so much that can be known about the candidates. To try and project things forward and know things in advance - I just think it's a fundamentally broken way of covering politics."
Here, too, there was a preoccupation with predicting the outcome.
Some in the media here did see the result coming - or even hoped for it.
"I do want Trump to win, because it's just going to be more fun. I find Trump hilarious," Heather Du Plessis-Allan told Newstalk ZB listeners in July.
In October, Sir John Key told ThreeNews he thought Trump would - and even should - win, while at the same time showing off his new helicopter.
Last week, The New Zealand Herald's business editor Liam Dann predicted the same result in the paper, though he didn't actually endorse it.
And in the Herald's live video coverage on Wednesday night, Dann seemed to be saying it was the smart money that had told him.
"The markets have called it, and there's no political bias there. Really it's just about making money. Markets can be wrong ... but at this stage it looks overwhelmingly like they see Trump coming in, and they're positioning themselves," he said.
US election coverage had a heavy focus on polling data and stats - much of which didn't help them predict the outcome. Photo: screenshot / NBC News
Allsop also thinks the speculation of political professionals and partisan pundits preoccupied the media.
"Too much coverage of this election has instead prioritised covering things that may or may not be true, while, in some cases, missing the things that were demonstrably important," he wrote in another piece called 'The Know-Nothing Election'.
"It's been hard to escape the conclusion that our understanding of this race has been funnelled less through actual voters' mouths than what political elites - and the campaign consultant class, in particular - imagine those voters to be thinking," he wrote.
"There is this just enormous political industry, particularly in [Washington] DC, and people who populate pundit panels on cable news shows. I'm not saying these people have no insight. But I think there's a real imbalance between that type of story and stories about the actual issues that will decide the election," Allsop told Mediawatch.
What should be done about that?
"A lot of journalists ... do go out into the country and speak to voters, particularly in swing states. The New York Times had this podcast The Run Up which spent well over a year going to different corners of the country and talking to different people.
"And I think if you listen to that, you would get a more sophisticated understanding of the American electorate than just from looking at some polling numbers.
"But I think you could make a very good case that it's not good to be covering an election for this long."
As Trump gave his victory speech, he was joined by podcasters and influencers who had boosted his message. Elon Musk had even danced on stage with Trump at his rallies while his social platform X pumped out algorithmically tweaked messages.
"It's tempting to conclude it's their media world now, and we just live in it," Allsop wrote afterwards.
"I was trying to indicate that maybe you shouldn't conclude that just yet - just as it's premature to go around drawing a bunch of conclusions about how good or bad the polling was a couple of days after the election," Allsop told Mediawatch.
"Some are saying: 'Trump going on Joe Rogan, and Rogan endorsing him was what won it'. Or 'Harris really messed up in not going on Joe Rogan'. It's very natural that pundits would sort of grasp for easy answers, and very often these focus on a media fad ... that people feel that they didn't focus on enough pre-election," he said.
"It also seems to be trendy among journalists at the moment to say we have no power, no influence anymore. We can't set the agenda.
"There's some truth to that, and I think it reflects a real anxiety about our loss of status as sort of informational gatekeepers. But it's really easy to overstate that, because podcasters need something to talk about. If there's no new information being put into the world, no stories to talk about on podcasts - they need that fuel.
"Even very right-wing media that spreads propaganda and disinformation is reacting to things that the mainstream media is pumping into the ecosystem. I think there is still an agenda-setting power there.
"It's almost like looking at it through a sort of dark mirror - but I don't think it equates to this idea that the media has, the mainstream, traditional media, whatever you want to call it, has totally lost all influence, and that just no one is listening."
Catering for the left and right
US news media have also been contemplating the problem that many appear to appeal to those with left-and liberal leanings - but are ignored or rejected by those on the right of politics.
"A former editor of the Washington Post wrote in his book that he was disappointed that only 10 percent of the paper's readers were Republicans. Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, wrote this sort of self-justificatory op-ed which said we must win back these people's trust," Allsop told Mediawatch.
"Well, that decision was so good for readers' trust that 250,000 people who were already paying for the paper decided to cancel their subscriptions.
"There's a kind of hand-wringing about winning back this imagined centrist voter or this imagined Trump voter as if there's this audience out there that is really willing to be unified by factual journalism.
"But I just think it's totally myopic. I think it totally neglects the fact that this hatred or distrust of the press has been intentionally built by a right-wing political movement and its associated sort of social media and media tools.
"I think it's also condescending towards people who might very well follow factual news but just not want to consume it all the time, or have voted based on their own pocketbooks.
"Washington Post [subscribers] didn't sign up because they saw the paper's editorial board endorse Hillary Clinton in 2016 or anything like that. And they haven't just left over the failure for an editorial to appear this time. They've left because they felt it's a betrayal of why they signed up.
"It would be great if all major news organisations had broad readerships - and if there wasn't a significant section of the American political spectrum that lives in sort of alternative information bubbles that has been poisoned against the idea of the mainstream media.
"But just wishing it was so won't make it so. In the meantime, you have millions and millions of people who did not vote for what America is about to enter, and who do want to read actual journalism about it.
"And the people that they're going to be writing about in the incoming Trump administration absolutely do not see a difference between resistance and accountability journalism. They think being held to account is a form of resistance that is intolerable to them - and that that makes you biased.
"Journalists producing that work could well be operating under extremely stressful and scary conditions that are unknown to them professionally. We're not going to entirely know what the climate for press freedom looks like until they actually take office, but it's going to be a difficult time. It's going to be a question of the American media industry having to figure it out as it goes along."
