This is an important story because of how the press handles it. Not all are doing equally well. Take a look at these stories and headlines, then see Jay Rosen, below.
New York Times:
Trump Claims, With No Evidence, That ‘Millions of People’ Voted Illegally
Officially, Mr. Trump’s transition team has dismissed the recount effort as “ridiculous” and a “scam,” saying there was no evidence of voter fraud that would justify the recounts. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign has also said that it has turned up no signs of such fraud or other irregularities, and the Obama administration has issued statements expressing its confidence in the validity of the vote tallies.
But Mr. Trump appeared fixated on Sunday on the recount and his electoral performance. In a series of midafternoon Twitter posts, not long before he boarded a flight to New York from Florida, Mr. Trump boasted that he could have easily won the “so-called popular vote” if he had campaigned only in “3 or 4” states, presumably populous ones.
WaPo headline was better:
Trump pushes conspiracy theory that ‘millions’ voted illegally for Clinton
It’s going to be a long four years.
Politico was even better:
Trump's baseless assertions of voter fraud called 'stunning'
Without putting forth any evidence, the president-elect says he actually won the popular vote.
LA Times:
Trump falsely claims that millions voted illegally, costing him the popular vote
This is all with the background of media still trying to figure out how to deal with Trump without normalizing lying and authoritarianism. See next piece.
Jay Rosen/Storify:
Evidence-based vs. accusation-driven reporting
My exchange with a journalist at USA Today illustrates what a struggle it is going to be to get this distinction established in news coverage after the 2016 election.
This article in USA Today came across my social feed a few days ago: Trump supporters target George Soros over protests. It's about the accusation in some quarters on the right that Soros is behind the protests that sprang up after the election that made Donald Trump president-elect. On Apple News the headline was: George Soros blamed for secretly funding Trump protests.
None of the 1,300 words in the article presents any evidence that this charge is true. (Seriously: none.) The entire "plot" of the piece is that accusations have been made, the people accused say the charges are baseless, and USA today found zero evidence to undermine their defense. The accusers include some of the least reliable people on the internet, including the notorious fantasist, Alex Jones of the Infowars site.
Andrew Prokop/Vox:
It’s only been two and a half weeks since the 2016 election, and Democrats are still hotly debating what went wrong. Could a different platform or messaging strategy have helped lead Hillary Clinton to victory? Would, perhaps, a more economically populist candidate have performed better? These questions will be picked over for years and are probably impossible to settle conclusively.
But as a first pass, it’s at least worth noting how Clinton performed compared with other Democratic candidates on the ballot with her — for instance, the party’s Senate candidates. Here’s how much their margins were better or worse than Clinton’s margin, according to the latest vote totals...
Interestingly enough, in two of those crucial Midwestern states that flipped to Trump, Democratic Senate candidates campaigned on economically populist platforms — but they did notably worse than Hillary Clinton. Russ Feingold underperformed Clinton by 2.4 points in Wisconsin, and Ted Strickland underperformed her by 12.8 points in Ohio. Feingold amassed a populist record of challenging big money and special interests when he was in the Senate, and Strickland harshly condemned trade deals during his campaign against Rob Portman (who served as George W. Bush’s US trade representative).
Meanwhile, the two Democratic Senate candidates in competitive races who outperformed Clinton the most both self-consciously presented a moderate image rather than running as liberal firebrands.
It’s important to try and separate out decent analysis from told you this was the problem, and here’s someone that agrees with me but we will do our best.
Ned Resnikoff/Media Matters:
Trump’s lies have a purpose. They are an assault on democracy.
Donald Trump is winning the war on reality. Welcome to the age of nightmares.
President-elect Donald Trump does not create new realities. He tells lies that are seemingly random, frequently inconsistent, and often plainly ridiculous.
He says or tweets things on the record and then denies having ever said them. He contradicts documented fact and then disregards anyone who points out the inaccuracies. He even lies when he has no discernible reason to do so — and then turns around and tells another lie that flies in the face of the previous one.
If Bush and Rove constructed a fantasy world with a clear internal logic, Trump has built something more like an endless bad dream. In his political universe, facts are unstable and ephemeral; events follow one after the other with no clear causal linkage; and danger is everywhere, although its source seems to change at random. Whereas President Bush offered America the illusion of morality clarity, President-elect Trump offers an ever-shifting phantasmagoria of sense impressions and unreliable information, barely held together by a fog of anxiety and bewilderment. Think Kafka more than Lord of the Rings.