Alan Duff: On the US election and Donald Trump - we were duped by the media

President-elect Donald Trump gives his acceptance speech during his election night rally. Photo / AP

Every reader and viewer saw headlines like ‘mathematical impossibility’ that Trump could win enough electoral votes.

9/11 is the historic date that showed Islamic extremists there was nothing they couldn't do in expressing their hatred for everything non-Islamic.

11/9 is the historic date that the United States of America confirmed itself the Disunited States, along with the apparent suicide of democracy. 11/9 seems to have proved that the constitutional right to vote is not so sacred after all. Just as Brexit proved the same thing: the power of the uneducated.

This result tells every future dictator and madman that people can be fools and their own worst enemies. That historic day will be pointed to as the moment when the freely expressed will of about 60 million American voters has changed the voting pattern of every free country on earth.

On the face of it this unexpected outcome looks like an act of collective self-destruction that seems to have blown democracy as we know it to smithereens. But just hold on. This is my second crack at this column. My first was, I have quickly come to realise, a knee-jerk reaction. As more information is revealed, I am more inclined to the view that we were duped.

It was never a "97 per cent" chance Clinton would be President. That was the wish of the liberal, Democrat-leaning journalists. As our only source of information on the American election or any other, the world collective of print and television media misinformed us. Every day, six days a week, I read in the International New York Times one columnist after another writing against Trump, against the Republicans, and all predicting a Clinton victory.

Like everyone, I believed this relentless propaganda. It never occurred that they might be wrong. Every reader and viewer saw headlines like "mathematical impossibility" that Trump could win enough electoral votes.

Wrong. Misinformation. Cynical reshaping of the truth. They told America lies. But the America that never reads their words or watches them on television were never asked their opinions. They were never polled because they don't count in the liberals' eyes. How dare they, the uneducated hillbillies, have a view on anything political?

The polls said Clinton is a certainty. The polls said the Dems will take back control of the House, of everything. The polls were an invention by people manipulating the populace of the USA into believing this to be a race between a monster and a not very likeable but capable woman.

Every reader and viewer saw headlines like 'mathematical impossibility' that Trump could win enough electoral votes.

The poll pills shoved down our throats were meant to make us feel better. And they did. Trump had ZERO chance. His run was about to come to an ignominious end. This was National Radio talking to its own class about its own narrow range of activities and interests, just on a huge scale.

I do not believe Trump's sexual predation has suddenly come to an end. Nor his ignorance replaced by enlightenment. That wall on the Mexican border is probably not going to be built. It was just campaign talk.

I don't think for a moment he'll ever release his tax returns. His out-sized ego can never diminish in size. However, I no longer believe he is a monster. Hateable, yes. But not as much as the media.

But CNN did, same as the New York Times. As for American women, how did 37 per cent of them vote for Trump, a filmed sex predator fessing up to it? 25 per cent of black males gave the Donald their vote. Yet we'd all been told those numbers wouldn't be more than 6-8 per cent. Hispanics? Come on, the Hispanics hate Trump's guts for calling them "rapists and murderers" and promising to build that wall. 27 per cent voted for the gringo with the funny hair.

My initial written reaction was all despair at the uneducated having the right to vote. I was wrong. In a democracy we each have that right and it is sacrosanct, as it should be. Just as the media has a responsibility, a sacred promise to keep us fully and fairly informed. This time they failed as miserably as Trump oppositely succeeded.

I still loathe the man. But I loathe dishonesty equally.