We're all still reeling from a presidential upset that few in the media or in either party had foreseen, but let's throw in another data point.
This was a post-truth election.
Donald Trump was, by objective measure, the most dishonest politician on the national stage. And it wasn't close. Trump lied about his own past statements. Trump lied about things that happened earlier in the campaign. Trump invented false "facts" and "statistics" to invent versions of America that were not true. Sometimes the media reported that these things were untrue, and sometimes they did not. But it didn't matter: The public, like the candidate, believed the things they wanted to and didn't believe the things they didn't.
When government intelligence officials told Trump that their agents had discovered a Russian connection to hacks on his Democratic opponents, Trump publicly declared them wrong. That was it; they were just wrong, because he said so.
This behavior was mirrored by his entire campaign team. Surrogates like Katrina Pierson were such regular liars that appearances were treated like performance art. The television channels were filled not only with Donald Trump giving speeches in which he claimed untrue things, but Trump supporters who would then insist those things were true to sometimes incredulous, but more often uninterested hosts.
The "serious" Republican punditry, however, rejected Trump. Longtime conservative pundits wrote pieces deploring his ignorance and declaring him temperamentally unfit for the role; there was a dearth of on-air talent willing to defend Trump's ideas or demonstrably false claims. So, in the interests of balance, CNN hired new pundits who would.
Facebook, smarting from conservative outrage that their less-sourced, less-nuanced stories were gaining fewer viewers than more objective outlets, responded to the charges by axing editorial input entirely; the news would be provided to Americans strictly via algorithm. The result was a new cottage industry of offshore news sites that prospered by inventing entirely fictional news pro-Trump Americans wanted to hear. Fraudulent news was, by corporate policy, given the same public profile and dissemination as factual news.
This was a post-truth American election, in that the truth behind candidate claims did not matter. It did not matter that Trump lied freely and provably; he was considered bold, not sociopathic. It did not matter that claims about "Benghazi" or "emails" were partisan fictions unsupported by each and every investigation that pursued them; partisans shouted lock her up anyway.
There are two ways to interpret this. The first is that the media was either unable or unwilling to convey that Trump and his surrogates were, disproportionally, telling voters false things.
But the other, worse possibility is that they did—and voters did not care. The electorate were willing to go along with the fraud so long as, as in their Facebook feeds, the frauds promoted their own ideological beliefs. They were considered, as in James O'Keefe's oeuvre of fudged videos, to be patriotic lies. They were presumed, by an electorate told for decades that the media was dishonest and that issue experts and academic voices were all frauds anyway, to be justifiable fudging in order to bend a biased world back in their direction. It may be propaganda, but it is in service to the cause; it may be a lie, but the lies are meant to describe the larger alleged "truth."
So what is the media in this new landscape? Bluntly put—does it even serve a purpose at all? If teens from Macedonia can invent Onionesque versions of the news that are treated as equally valid to the American national press institutions, what happens then?
A democracy cannot survive an uneducated electorate. It cannot function in an environment in which truth and demagoguery are treated as two equal foes, the battles between them fought solely on which is most pleasingly put in twenty-second soundbites. It is the hallmark of dictatorships and one-party states, but in the lands of the self-governed it vests full power in whichever movement can most effectively demonize, discredit, and dismantle the others.
If it is that second thing; if Trump did not win this election in spite of his egregious lies and factless charges, but because of them, we are at a more dangerous time than we know.