As I read the comments about the election from various members of the mainstream media, especially their shock at the big win by Donald Trump (quoted in The Wall Street Journal's "Notable & Quotable" on November 7), I couldn’t help but wonder whether the Harris (formerly Biden) team was similarly surprised by the outcome – and if they were, whether they were misled because they had believed what the MSM had been telling them about the campaign. In other words, did the Harris campaign suffer from the “Taranto effect”?
In 2004, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the original “Swifties,” tried to tell the public about John Kerry’s charges to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971: that American soldiers and sailors had routinely committed war crimes and other atrocities in Vietnam. But the MSM ignored them and the issue. James Taranto, then-editor of WSJ.com’s OpinionJournal, hypothesized that the Kerry campaign was misled by the MSM into thinking that they, too, could ignore the issue. By the time the Kerry campaign realized it couldn’t, it was too late.
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