In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, there was a lot of attention focused on the role of "fake news," but a year later, a study published in the Columbia Journalism Review told a very different story, with the blunt title, "Don't blame the election on fake news. Blame it on the media." Instead of fake news — which was a real but relatively small problem in 2016 (all fake Russian ads amounted to 0.1 percent of Facebook's daily advertising revenue) — it centered on an analysis of the New York Times' agenda-setting campaign coverage: America's paper of record ran as many front-page stories about Hillary Clinton's emails (10) in the last six days before the election as it did about all policy details combined in the two months before the election.
"If Clinton had a hard time getting her message out, she certainly didn't get much help from the newspaper of record," I wrote here at the time. "Even though Trump got slightly more front-page scandal coverage than Clinton did, he faced nothing remotely like the six-day avalanche she endured."
So I heard a sharp echo of the 2016 election on Nov 27, when the New York Times tweeted out a story this way:
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