How, exactly, does a such a creature as Donald Trump become president of the most powerful nation on Earth? The blame falls primarily, of course, on the benighted voters who placed their X beside his name.

But there seems to be lots of blame to go around. It was President Biden’s fault for not stepping down early enough, Kamala Harris’s for not distancing herself from Biden, the Democratic Party’s for ignoring Gaza and numerous other reasons, and so it goes.

Not to be left out of the speculation, I have come up with a reason of my own: I place the blame on the communication environment. If Joe Biden’s economic record had been effectively communicated to the masses and reasonably understood, he would have won. It wasn’t and he didn’t.

Let’s consider his record. He has instituted programs that will shift the country to clean energy, create or bring onshore a number of industries, and build thousands of infrastructure projects, creating hundreds of thousands of good union jobs in the process. He has strengthened organized labour while breaking up concentrations of corporate power. He is the champion of the working class. He has been making America great again.

And for all this, he has gotten almost zero credit. Americans seem almost oblivious to these programs and the way they will improve their country. All they know about economics during Biden’s term is there has been a serious bout of inflation. That they know from their weekly shopping. This didn’t occur under Trump so they voted for the Donald.

The real question then becomes why were voters so ignorant of “Bidenomics.” Another president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, carried out similar programs in the 1930s and had no trouble being recognized and rewarded for his leadership. He was re-elected with strong majorities three times.

But FDR had no trouble communicating his programs. In those days, people had two instruments for getting the news—radio and newspapers. Roosevelt took full advantage of radio with a series of “fireside chats” that brought him into the nation’s living rooms where he could explain his programs. Newspapers provided a reliable source of news that everyone shared. There was a community of shared knowledge, knowledge that factually represented the real world.

Biden faces a very different communication environment. We live in the “information age” with countless sources of information, many of them spreading misinformation or disinformation, if not outright conspiracy theories. We do what people are inclined to do; we seek out information that confirms our personal biases and there’s a source out there for every bias.

The result is a world of fragmented reality with each individual or tribe creating its own. In such a world there was little potential for Americans to comprehensively share reliable information about Biden’s programs. It was not surprising therefore that they voted in ignorance of how those programs would restructure the American economy for a fairer and more prosperous America. Ironically, if anyone gets credit, it will be Trump.

That’s my theory anyway. Perhaps I’m wrong and the Democrats just failed to sell Biden’s accomplishments. Or maybe a lot of working class Americans just wanted to thumb their noses at the “elites.” (In which case they will ultimately discover the joke’s on them.) Or maybe, as I wrote in my last post, they are so overwhelmed by change generally and inflation specifically that they have given up on democracy and want a strongman to save them.

But if I’m right, the communication environment is presenting a seriously dangerous problem. In the U.S. it could undermine their republic. And a solution is hard to see. At the very least it reminds us once again of the need for news media that can accurately cover issues and widely share the information. All the more reason to defend Mother CBC.