But can you use it in a sentence?

I don't know where your tipping point was, but I started to tire of election post-mortems about last Thursday. Like public opinion surveys, what's exciting about them isn't usually very valid, and what's valid about them isn't usually very exciting. Whether old media or new media, they tend toward the sort of see-you-shoulda-listened-to-me brand-building that ages poorly. (And -- actual southerner here -- I'd be happy if the broadcast oligarchs of 2026 tell James Carville to just go stick his head in a barrel and yell for a while.*)

So above is a morning-after lede from the AP for your consideration, offered less as a diagnosis than as a way of thinking about what news could look like over the ensuing months and years. What struck me, as an old paid-to-read-this-stuff hand from back in the Carter administration, was how unusual it seems to see "Trump" and "felony conviction" in the same paragraph -- compared with, say, the number of times you saw "Biden" close to "disastrous debate" in AP stories in the past five months.** That points us toward some conclusions about how the agenda-setting paradigm, and what we know about media effects in general, can help attack the conventional wisdom.

My starting point is some of the self-justifying blather I'm seeing on the right flank: People weren't fooled -- they knew exactly what they were voting for, and that's what they wanted. I agree that a large proportion of US voters knew exactly who they were voting for: the lying, gropey, vengeful old clown who thinks all the world's a sound stage and hates all the people they wish they could hate. What they were voting for is a different question, and that's where Fox News comes into the equation.

We've known for two decades that Fox users are more likely than users of grownup media to believe in things that aren't so. Kull et al (2003) looked at beliefs about justifications for the second US-Iraq war: presence of WMD, strong Qa'ida-Iraq links, and worldwide support for a US invasion. Fox users were the most likely to hold at least one misperception; public media users (and in those glorious days, newspaper readers) the least likely to hold any misperceptions.

Because it doesn't hit the usual metrics of polling drama during campaign season (see above, under sexy vs. valid), you might not have seen an October survey from Ipsos that looked at the relationship between news source and political understanding. Unsurprisingly, participants who get their news from Fox and other right-wing outlets saw immigration as the most important problem facing the country; for participants overall, it was the economy; in the category of national newspapers and (non-Fox) cable, the MIP was "political extremism or threats to democracy."

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