Whatever be the outcome of the US Presidential election—at the time of writing it is not clear who is winning—if there is one thing that stands out, it’s the failure of American mainstream or legacy media, as well as pollsters and polling agencies, to project the correct picture of the situation on the ground ahead of the election. Until a day ago, Joe Biden was being given a landslide victory over Donald Trump and was expected to sweep every battleground state. If opinion polls/ratings could decide the election, Joe Biden would be President by now, several times over. In reality, once the votes started being counted, not only did Donald Trump start doing exceedingly well in the battleground states, but it looked like that he might even win the race. It is curious that a system which worked near flawlessly until 2016, broke down to an extent that it got the election completely wrong, twice—both in 2016 and in 2020. Mr Biden may still win, but American media has not covered itself with glory in the way it has covered the election. Busy building a narrative against Mr Trump in the last four years, they either forgot to speak to actual people, or even if they did, that did not get reflected in what they were telling the world about Mr Trump’s “unpopularity”. There is no doubt that America is a deeply divided society, but then the media is supposed to tell the stories from both sides of the divide. Instead, a huge fraud on democracy was committed by the American media and their pollsters—aided and abetted by social media giants—by trying to influence voting by not only giving wrong figures, but also by suppressing news uncomplimentary to Mr Biden, especially those related to Hunter Biden. It defies intelligence that world renowned pollsters in a nation that has made a science out of predicting elections can get things so wrong when it comes to Donald Trump. Is it a case of the science going bad, or is the bias way too deep? The problem is, this is the same legacy media that the rest of the world is asked to look up to and trust as paragons of good journalism. We have seen how skewed their coverage can be on issues related to India—from plainly racist to pure slander. It is this media that feted Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan as the poster boy of liberalism and western values, while attributing to India all the things that Pakistan is guilty of—from oppression of minorities, to radicalism, authoritarianism and fascism. The loss of face for US mainstream media has been such that it is getting difficult to trust anything they say or write, which is extremely sad.
In conclusion, it must be mentioned that as Indians we should feel proud of the way our electoral democracy functions—most efficiently. The Election Commission of India, a Constitutional body, does an exemplary job of conducting the elections, with everything planned down to the last detail. Compare this to the situation in Pennsylvania and Georgia, where, at the time of writing, counting had stopped because no provision had been made for counting of votes through the night for an election as crucial as the Presidential! Worse, there is already talk about court battles over mail-in ballots and it may be many days before the world gets to know who the next US President is. This sort of a mess is unthinkable in India. Here parties go out of power, come to power, without a whimper from either the losers or the voters. Everyone accepts the verdict, whatever be it, gracefully. No one worries about street protests breaking out if a candidate or a party loses—what a contrast to the situation in US where there is widespread fear of post-result rioting.
