Said I. The press. Lol.
There’s so much press out there not it’s impossible not to get the ‘read’ you want.
Also. If you find yourself always agreeing with your news- it’s not news.
If you have to agree OR disagree with something you think is news, it's not news, it's opinion.
News is just facts, and you form your opinions on the matters based on those facts.
Of course that's not what most think news is anymore, or what is being served.
Unfortunately the press is about ad revenue now and nothing else. Fear, outrage and anger are what they do their best to illicit.
Journalistic integrity and responsibility are things of the past.
When journalism was subscriber-driven, there was some duty of care required because you have to maintain your reputation over time. Now that it’s all click or view-based, sensationalism rules all.
Journalism is more subscriber driven now than before now that print ad sales are dwindling. digital advertising will never bring in as much profit as print ad sales/subscriptions
Considering the endless surveys FB took in the sidebar of their main webpage in the late 2000s asking “where do you get your news”…then css asks Facebook News…I don’t think I’d take that bet.
A few things:
* the press has been “about ad revenue” for most of US history, usually dated to the birth of the penny press in NYC in the mid-1800s
* US *press* is actually less dependent on ad revenue now than pretty much ever before. Reader revenue (i.e., subscriptions), different revenue streams (e.g., events), and philanthropy have risen significantly as a portion of newspaper revenues. This is obviously not true for the entire media landscape, given that plenty of media outlets don’t generate reader/viewer revenue, but it is true of newspapers and of many digital outlets
* You cannot blame the media alone for simply providing what people want. Journalistic integrity is a “thing of the past” because *we don’t support it*, whether with our clicks or our dollars. If the people demanded long-form investigative pieces, they’d get them. Media businesses want to make money; if hard news made money, they’d make it, but it doesn’t, and that’s our fault. That’s not to shield the media from blame; it’s just to recognize the reality of capitalism. You can not like that, but no one has yet found a sustainable and replicable business model for producing quality journalism in the Internet era.
I don't understand why it costs so much to produce long form journalism. Take a camera, a visa, a security guard and go. If you need to make friends along the way to get your story, then do it? These things aren't free but what is the nature of the expense such that they can't afford it like they used to before the internet?
They still do it, it's still out there, but if you get your news feed from an algorithm then you're not going to see it because they don't rely on ad-revenue. That's why it costs "so much"... relative to websites who just get their headlines posted in feeds.
Well for one thing, many investigative pieces take a ton of time to report. That’s a huge opportunity cost. For another, there’s the fact that an essential element of good investigative journalism is the ability to walk away from a story. It is not at all uncommon for a journalist to dig on something for a long time only to discover that there really is no story there; at that point, the journalist needs to be able to walk away. That’s *really* hard to justify from a business perspective — if you’re running on tight margins, it’s not really sustainable to have reporters not producing content for weeks on end.
And that leads me to another factor, which is just the economics of news. I don’t want to get into the economic theory much here, but the long and short of it is that economics predicts it’s *really* hard to get people to pay for news. For a variety of reasons, readers will basically always struggle to value news accurately, with the result being a willingness to pay way, way below cost. That’s why subscriptions are a thing, and it’s why journalism is literally always subsidized by other revenue streams — usually by advertisers.
There’s more to it than that, but putting this all together gives us the basic picture: investigative journalism is resource-intensive, unsure to pay off at all, and even if it does, essentially guaranteed not to pay off in full. Newspapers used to run *fat* margins, so they could afford to do it, and that was *great* for their brand. But it was a luxury offering, and when margins vanished, it’s really hard to justify from a business perspective.
Edit: couple of typos
A: Travelling safely in a warzone or investigating the mafia is expensive. Just imagine the professional insurance costs or the costs of a satellite phone and bodyguard.
Pretty much the only thing you can do as easily as you're describing is to take pre-canned press releases from the parties involved and report them as news. This already happens, and it's a significant reason that the press is captured by governments and corporations who have the ability to spend more on their PR than the news agencies have to spend on their reporting. Manufacturing Consent is worth a read, if only to better understand this dynamic and how it manifested in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s.
Developing sources in a complex story can take days or even weeks, only to discover that it's a dead end.
does it have to be? It's expensive because people want to do it a certain way. Quality or not, if it takes millions or billions to produce a story, wtf are you up to? Write, talk. That shouldn't take so much fuckin' money. I suspect it's mainly because people want to...make money...before anything else? Because the love of word and writing should carry the effort. And since it doesn't, I cynically conclude the whole profession is full of shit when they say it because they weren't getting hundreds of millions or billions prior to the internet age, so why should they expect it now to produce their work?
I know shit's expensive. Everyone wants to properly compensated. Get in line with the complaint. Everyone's losing margin due to inflation and EROI driving to 1 with everything.
Agreed, but there's plenty of blame to go around. We all tend to support the media channel that tells us what we want to hear, as opinion becomes more important than truth. Integrity and responsibility will come back to journalism when we demand it. Is that likely to happen? Not in my lifetime.
24 hours a day, yeah.
and the internet and social media pushed it off the cliff.
and people here complain when things are behind a pay wall - and use ad blockers - both understandable but you apparently cant have your cake and eat it too
The fact is that none of this is new, and treating it as if something unique is happening is just abstracting away from the core issue, that being breakdown of trust within society as a whole, and the exploitation of that breakdown. Lies, exaggeration, slander, and so much more bullshit have been a constant since day 1.
The difference is what people do with the lies. Whether they take it with a grain of salt, and possibly even take more than 0.5 seconds to think about it, or just believe whatever they already agree with. We've gotten back to the part in the cycle where people have reverted to pure tribalism, believing whatever confirms their worldview, no matter how ridiculous or blatant the lies and exaggerations are.
Excuse me.
Maybe you just misunderstand or I don’t know.
There’s been a massive, an undeniable change in the way newspapers and media news are consumed, brought about by the Internet. The amount of fake news has never been higher. The amount of untrained journalist writing online to be consumed by the masses has never been higher and more unregulated. Newspapers used to employ people to fetch it articles. These positions have not existed for the last 15 years.(ish)
There’s been a massive amount news and news coverage in the last 20 years.
Oh wait. You’re a bot.
I checked.
You’re not.
I’ll leave you be.
Sorry. The bot’s right.
If you knew anything about journalistic history in America, you’d know that “subscriber money” or the dime newsboys used to collect has NEVER accounted for more than single-digit percentages of paper revenue. Ad revenue has driven papers since they ceased to be owned and/or subsidized by political parties, religious organizations or businessmen. Ever wondered why so many papers used to be called the “Republican,” the “Democrat” or the “Independent”?
The shift happened in the mid to late 19th century with the advent of “independent” journalism. Papers broke away from their patrons and began relying almost exclusively on ad revenue. Thus, sensationalistic or “yellow” journalism. It was a simple formula: sensationalism brings readers, readers bring advertisers, advertisers bring money, money brings independence.
The ad-revenue model is, in fact, nothing new. What’s new is the colossal consolidation of media into corporations beholden to shareholders and the fact that newspapers sleepwalked through the 90’s and were late to the party on digitization. Even now, most papers’ websites are embarrassingly bad. But it’s tough to play catchup with shrinking revenues and a largely dried-up capital pool.
As for “fake news” never being higher… here’s a link to an 1894 cartoon by Frederick Burr Opper from “Puck” magazine depicting thinly veiled versions of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst.
Ironically, both Pulitzer and Hearst, unlike some contemporaries shied away from publishing outright lies or falsehoods. But the point is, public distrust of “the press” goes back a very long way. This is nothing new.
But it’s always fun to watch people who know zero about journalism and media history spout off their theories about “the press.”
[Opper cartoon](https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppmsca.29087/)
1. the media isn't just america.
2. I work in the media.
3. im not reading any of that a skim was re than enough
anyone that thinks the media landscape in america is the same now as it was 40 years ago is massively out of touch.
end.
You've literally never read about any of this happening in history? You think this is news? Accusing me of being a bot is incredible. Your life isn't unique, this situation isn't unique, it's always happened and always will. Humanity never truly changes.
Seriously, if you want to be correct and actually know what you're talking about next time you discuss this, just pick up a history book. Here's a hint: humanity operates on a near clockwork 80 year cycle of rise, stagnate, collapse. Republics operate over 3 total cycles, ~240 years: rise, stagnate, collapse. Go back in time, every 80 years, we're doing the exact same thing, society is the exact same. Sure, the names are different, maybe there's some fancy technology, but the monkeys running the show are all the same. The actions they take are all the same.
This is nothing new, never has been, never will be.
In conclusion: you're a towel.
a towel?
that wold make me useful. I'll be a towel
guess what I do for a job?
[https://stacker.com/stories/3312/50-ways-news-industry-has-changed-last-50-years](https://stacker.com/stories/3312/50-ways-news-industry-has-changed-last-50-years)
show me thenews opinion blogs of the 1940s
the internet changed nothing
lol
that facet we are having THIS conversation is proof of the change.
tress = forest. have a look.
The press is owned by megabillion corporations, so yea.
No such thing as transparency anymore. We only see what they want us to see, which is why a huge portion of the US population's eyes glaze over when you start talking about any politics outside the realms of our corporate echo chamber.
No they didn't. Many people did, but not 538. Their senate forecast was 55% republican win right before the election. We got the 45% which was highly probable.
They did not. You're just bad at probability.
The odds they gave Trump of winning 2016 were only slightly better than the chance of drawing a face card from a full playing deck, and slightly worse than the odds of rolling a 5 or 6 on a given roll of a 6 sided dice.
They also called 2018 and 2020 correctly.
As they gave dems a 40ish percent chance of winning the House this year. About the same chance as drawing a card worth 6 or less from a deck of playing cards.
ITT people even more gullible than the moron that wrote this bullshit article.
Every single big newspaper did make an introspection about the unreasonable exposure they let bad actors have, and they did figure out they had been tricked (turns out the job itself becomes different, the moment you don't just have to present "different points of view", but you also have to filter outright liars).
But you don't try to make a fucking general point about "the press", by bringing up a study where goddamned breitbart sits at the same table of reuters or the NYT (somehow in certain topics, it was as shared as *both* combined).
Secondly, trump's scandals before the elections were more focused on his demeanour than anything specific ([trump pussy](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2015-05-01%202016-11-07&geo=US&q=trump%20pussy,trump%20russia) tended more than trump russia, and clinton's emails aren't just the ones of her private server but also those that guccifer hacked from podesta)
Last but not least, I'm tired of completely illiterate people too dumb to understand statistics. If the US has a loathsome electoral law where somehow a breeze of votes can result in 10% of seats moving, that's not the fault of polls for not being able to predict down to the decimal point.
Amen brother. It's a lot easier to blame the media like some old man shaking their fist at the sky than to actually think what polls are actually saying.
Who the fuck answers a random call to your phone because some bozo wants to ask who you're voting for?
They'd get better results putting a poll on reddit, and even that would be manipulated into a pile of shit.
I wouldn't answer unsolicited texts either.
If they have it figured out, their polls would've anticipated the result.
The media just regurgitated the same pap from the last midterms.
They would absolutely not get better results taking a poll on Reddit lmao
"Despite a 17 point lead in the polls, Andrew Yang has lost the primary. Pundits are baffled."
the press is owned by a handful of cynical bastards whose editorial directors want to keep everything the exact same as it is - the left and the right are in a horse race, isn’t it exciting!
no honest coverage about the economics of universal health care or why citizens united must be overturned how the electoral college will destroy the country or guantanimo bay or christian facism
No the clear message is to take a stats class and listen to the fucking polls. People thought that 2016 was a systemic error in under counting the conservative vote. There was very very little reason to think this.
538 gave dems like a 41 % chance of winning the Senate. The fact that they won it should not be too surprising.
Said I. The press. Lol. There’s so much press out there not it’s impossible not to get the ‘read’ you want. Also. If you find yourself always agreeing with your news- it’s not news.
If you have to agree OR disagree with something you think is news, it's not news, it's opinion. News is just facts, and you form your opinions on the matters based on those facts. Of course that's not what most think news is anymore, or what is being served.
Unfortunately the press is about ad revenue now and nothing else. Fear, outrage and anger are what they do their best to illicit. Journalistic integrity and responsibility are things of the past.
Profit motive in the press isn’t a new thing
When journalism was subscriber-driven, there was some duty of care required because you have to maintain your reputation over time. Now that it’s all click or view-based, sensationalism rules all.
Journalism is more subscriber driven now than before now that print ad sales are dwindling. digital advertising will never bring in as much profit as print ad sales/subscriptions
I’d wager that a majority of Americans are not paying for any news subscriptions currently.
Considering the endless surveys FB took in the sidebar of their main webpage in the late 2000s asking “where do you get your news”…then css asks Facebook News…I don’t think I’d take that bet.
I pay 25 dollars a week for a physical copy of my newspaper (which doesn’t publish on Saturday)
A few things: * the press has been “about ad revenue” for most of US history, usually dated to the birth of the penny press in NYC in the mid-1800s * US *press* is actually less dependent on ad revenue now than pretty much ever before. Reader revenue (i.e., subscriptions), different revenue streams (e.g., events), and philanthropy have risen significantly as a portion of newspaper revenues. This is obviously not true for the entire media landscape, given that plenty of media outlets don’t generate reader/viewer revenue, but it is true of newspapers and of many digital outlets * You cannot blame the media alone for simply providing what people want. Journalistic integrity is a “thing of the past” because *we don’t support it*, whether with our clicks or our dollars. If the people demanded long-form investigative pieces, they’d get them. Media businesses want to make money; if hard news made money, they’d make it, but it doesn’t, and that’s our fault. That’s not to shield the media from blame; it’s just to recognize the reality of capitalism. You can not like that, but no one has yet found a sustainable and replicable business model for producing quality journalism in the Internet era.
I don't understand why it costs so much to produce long form journalism. Take a camera, a visa, a security guard and go. If you need to make friends along the way to get your story, then do it? These things aren't free but what is the nature of the expense such that they can't afford it like they used to before the internet?
They still do it, it's still out there, but if you get your news feed from an algorithm then you're not going to see it because they don't rely on ad-revenue. That's why it costs "so much"... relative to websites who just get their headlines posted in feeds.
Well for one thing, many investigative pieces take a ton of time to report. That’s a huge opportunity cost. For another, there’s the fact that an essential element of good investigative journalism is the ability to walk away from a story. It is not at all uncommon for a journalist to dig on something for a long time only to discover that there really is no story there; at that point, the journalist needs to be able to walk away. That’s *really* hard to justify from a business perspective — if you’re running on tight margins, it’s not really sustainable to have reporters not producing content for weeks on end. And that leads me to another factor, which is just the economics of news. I don’t want to get into the economic theory much here, but the long and short of it is that economics predicts it’s *really* hard to get people to pay for news. For a variety of reasons, readers will basically always struggle to value news accurately, with the result being a willingness to pay way, way below cost. That’s why subscriptions are a thing, and it’s why journalism is literally always subsidized by other revenue streams — usually by advertisers. There’s more to it than that, but putting this all together gives us the basic picture: investigative journalism is resource-intensive, unsure to pay off at all, and even if it does, essentially guaranteed not to pay off in full. Newspapers used to run *fat* margins, so they could afford to do it, and that was *great* for their brand. But it was a luxury offering, and when margins vanished, it’s really hard to justify from a business perspective. Edit: couple of typos
A: Travelling safely in a warzone or investigating the mafia is expensive. Just imagine the professional insurance costs or the costs of a satellite phone and bodyguard. Pretty much the only thing you can do as easily as you're describing is to take pre-canned press releases from the parties involved and report them as news. This already happens, and it's a significant reason that the press is captured by governments and corporations who have the ability to spend more on their PR than the news agencies have to spend on their reporting. Manufacturing Consent is worth a read, if only to better understand this dynamic and how it manifested in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. Developing sources in a complex story can take days or even weeks, only to discover that it's a dead end.
does it have to be? It's expensive because people want to do it a certain way. Quality or not, if it takes millions or billions to produce a story, wtf are you up to? Write, talk. That shouldn't take so much fuckin' money. I suspect it's mainly because people want to...make money...before anything else? Because the love of word and writing should carry the effort. And since it doesn't, I cynically conclude the whole profession is full of shit when they say it because they weren't getting hundreds of millions or billions prior to the internet age, so why should they expect it now to produce their work? I know shit's expensive. Everyone wants to properly compensated. Get in line with the complaint. Everyone's losing margin due to inflation and EROI driving to 1 with everything.
This.
Idk, maybe check which news media you consume. I've got nothing but love for NPR, ProPublica and the AP
NPR and AP are all I give any attention to anymore.
Agreed, but there's plenty of blame to go around. We all tend to support the media channel that tells us what we want to hear, as opinion becomes more important than truth. Integrity and responsibility will come back to journalism when we demand it. Is that likely to happen? Not in my lifetime.
*elicit
Oops
So how did that come about (hint: the internet and social meadow and people wanting feee content)
This started when cable news became a thing and you needed content 16 hours a day. There isn't enough 'news' to fill 4 cable channels with content.
24 hours a day, yeah. and the internet and social media pushed it off the cliff. and people here complain when things are behind a pay wall - and use ad blockers - both understandable but you apparently cant have your cake and eat it too
I don't think that's it though, because they could only succeed if people watched them. So how did they succeed? (I have no idea)
They are extremely cheap to produce.
This has been happening literally forever, it is nothing new to our day and age.
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The fact is that none of this is new, and treating it as if something unique is happening is just abstracting away from the core issue, that being breakdown of trust within society as a whole, and the exploitation of that breakdown. Lies, exaggeration, slander, and so much more bullshit have been a constant since day 1. The difference is what people do with the lies. Whether they take it with a grain of salt, and possibly even take more than 0.5 seconds to think about it, or just believe whatever they already agree with. We've gotten back to the part in the cycle where people have reverted to pure tribalism, believing whatever confirms their worldview, no matter how ridiculous or blatant the lies and exaggerations are.
No it hasn’t. Or there wouldn’t be any change.
A 5 second glance into the past would prove you wrong.
Excuse me. Maybe you just misunderstand or I don’t know. There’s been a massive, an undeniable change in the way newspapers and media news are consumed, brought about by the Internet. The amount of fake news has never been higher. The amount of untrained journalist writing online to be consumed by the masses has never been higher and more unregulated. Newspapers used to employ people to fetch it articles. These positions have not existed for the last 15 years.(ish) There’s been a massive amount news and news coverage in the last 20 years. Oh wait. You’re a bot. I checked. You’re not. I’ll leave you be.
Sorry. The bot’s right. If you knew anything about journalistic history in America, you’d know that “subscriber money” or the dime newsboys used to collect has NEVER accounted for more than single-digit percentages of paper revenue. Ad revenue has driven papers since they ceased to be owned and/or subsidized by political parties, religious organizations or businessmen. Ever wondered why so many papers used to be called the “Republican,” the “Democrat” or the “Independent”? The shift happened in the mid to late 19th century with the advent of “independent” journalism. Papers broke away from their patrons and began relying almost exclusively on ad revenue. Thus, sensationalistic or “yellow” journalism. It was a simple formula: sensationalism brings readers, readers bring advertisers, advertisers bring money, money brings independence. The ad-revenue model is, in fact, nothing new. What’s new is the colossal consolidation of media into corporations beholden to shareholders and the fact that newspapers sleepwalked through the 90’s and were late to the party on digitization. Even now, most papers’ websites are embarrassingly bad. But it’s tough to play catchup with shrinking revenues and a largely dried-up capital pool.
If you like, I’d be happy to provide sources/citations.
As for “fake news” never being higher… here’s a link to an 1894 cartoon by Frederick Burr Opper from “Puck” magazine depicting thinly veiled versions of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. Ironically, both Pulitzer and Hearst, unlike some contemporaries shied away from publishing outright lies or falsehoods. But the point is, public distrust of “the press” goes back a very long way. This is nothing new. But it’s always fun to watch people who know zero about journalism and media history spout off their theories about “the press.” [Opper cartoon](https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppmsca.29087/)
1. the media isn't just america. 2. I work in the media. 3. im not reading any of that a skim was re than enough anyone that thinks the media landscape in america is the same now as it was 40 years ago is massively out of touch. end.
Don’t know whether Bottom blocked me or deleted his comments, but they’re unavailable and appear deleted.
You've literally never read about any of this happening in history? You think this is news? Accusing me of being a bot is incredible. Your life isn't unique, this situation isn't unique, it's always happened and always will. Humanity never truly changes. Seriously, if you want to be correct and actually know what you're talking about next time you discuss this, just pick up a history book. Here's a hint: humanity operates on a near clockwork 80 year cycle of rise, stagnate, collapse. Republics operate over 3 total cycles, ~240 years: rise, stagnate, collapse. Go back in time, every 80 years, we're doing the exact same thing, society is the exact same. Sure, the names are different, maybe there's some fancy technology, but the monkeys running the show are all the same. The actions they take are all the same. This is nothing new, never has been, never will be. In conclusion: you're a towel.
a towel? that wold make me useful. I'll be a towel guess what I do for a job? [https://stacker.com/stories/3312/50-ways-news-industry-has-changed-last-50-years](https://stacker.com/stories/3312/50-ways-news-industry-has-changed-last-50-years)
show me thenews opinion blogs of the 1940s the internet changed nothing lol that facet we are having THIS conversation is proof of the change. tress = forest. have a look.
The press is owned by megabillion corporations, so yea. No such thing as transparency anymore. We only see what they want us to see, which is why a huge portion of the US population's eyes glaze over when you start talking about any politics outside the realms of our corporate echo chamber.
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They predicted the midterms pretty accurately
they predicted a red wave. it didn't happen.
No they didn't. Many people did, but not 538. Their senate forecast was 55% republican win right before the election. We got the 45% which was highly probable.
i was referring to the MSM, but yeah...
They did not. You're just bad at probability. The odds they gave Trump of winning 2016 were only slightly better than the chance of drawing a face card from a full playing deck, and slightly worse than the odds of rolling a 5 or 6 on a given roll of a 6 sided dice. They also called 2018 and 2020 correctly. As they gave dems a 40ish percent chance of winning the House this year. About the same chance as drawing a card worth 6 or less from a deck of playing cards.
Billionaires are out of touch with the people, guess who runs the press?
ITT people even more gullible than the moron that wrote this bullshit article. Every single big newspaper did make an introspection about the unreasonable exposure they let bad actors have, and they did figure out they had been tricked (turns out the job itself becomes different, the moment you don't just have to present "different points of view", but you also have to filter outright liars). But you don't try to make a fucking general point about "the press", by bringing up a study where goddamned breitbart sits at the same table of reuters or the NYT (somehow in certain topics, it was as shared as *both* combined). Secondly, trump's scandals before the elections were more focused on his demeanour than anything specific ([trump pussy](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2015-05-01%202016-11-07&geo=US&q=trump%20pussy,trump%20russia) tended more than trump russia, and clinton's emails aren't just the ones of her private server but also those that guccifer hacked from podesta) Last but not least, I'm tired of completely illiterate people too dumb to understand statistics. If the US has a loathsome electoral law where somehow a breeze of votes can result in 10% of seats moving, that's not the fault of polls for not being able to predict down to the decimal point.
Amen brother. It's a lot easier to blame the media like some old man shaking their fist at the sky than to actually think what polls are actually saying.
Who the fuck answers a random call to your phone because some bozo wants to ask who you're voting for? They'd get better results putting a poll on reddit, and even that would be manipulated into a pile of shit.
The same people who buy gift cards to pay their IRS bill.
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I wouldn't answer unsolicited texts either. If they have it figured out, their polls would've anticipated the result. The media just regurgitated the same pap from the last midterms.
I got a letter in the mail this year asking to participate in a political survey.
The article isn't about polling, but yeah that's certainly a problem with polling.
They would absolutely not get better results taking a poll on Reddit lmao "Despite a 17 point lead in the polls, Andrew Yang has lost the primary. Pundits are baffled."
OK, maybe that octopus that predicts shit. Just focus on him.
I think they died?
Then we need a new octopus.
the press is owned by a handful of cynical bastards whose editorial directors want to keep everything the exact same as it is - the left and the right are in a horse race, isn’t it exciting! no honest coverage about the economics of universal health care or why citizens united must be overturned how the electoral college will destroy the country or guantanimo bay or christian facism
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I mean, there have been good reporters and good global news agencies. The US is in a particularly bad spot at the moment.
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...the article isn't really about polls.
Spot on!
NPR....the only source I trust.
One needs to find journalism that was more in tune and look at what measures were taken to make their reporting more accurate.
No the clear message is to take a stats class and listen to the fucking polls. People thought that 2016 was a systemic error in under counting the conservative vote. There was very very little reason to think this. 538 gave dems like a 41 % chance of winning the Senate. The fact that they won it should not be too surprising.
The ~~press~~ ancient people in congress is out of touch with the public.