HOW TRUMP PLAYED THE MEDIA

THERE AREN’T A LOT of people or things that have not yet been blamed for the election of Donald Trump. FBI Director James Comey. Vladimir Putin, Hillary Clinton, Jon Stewart, Sean Hannity. Twitter, Facebook, CNN, the Democratic National Committee, and oh, Donald Trump. There’s a good case to be made for almost every culprit you can imagine, and a think piece or tweetstorm to lay it out.

This is not going to be one of those pieces. As my colleague Kevin Drum has written, “for the most part, people are just blaming all the stuff they already believed in.” But in the flood of emails we got from readers after the election, one question came up over and over again—the role of the media.

And that happens to be an issue we’ve been obsessed with at MoJo. We believe that the business model for media in the United States is broken, and that if we’re going to have the kind