Late Tuesday night, John Ekdahl of Decision Desk HQ posed a question to his followers in the “Media Twitter” sphere: Do they know anyone who owns a pickup truck?
At least as Sean Davis, co-founder of conservative website The Federalist saw it, the results were disastrous for the media members who chimed in. For example, one of the tweets he cited was this one from Oliver Willis of Media Matters:
As well as this one from think tank VP and Vox columnist Will Wilkinson:
Even if take issue with the premise of the question, something like Wilkinson’s tweet still misses the point, so it’s understandable why Davis would single it out. However, there are others that pointed out legitimate flaws in the logic of the idea that a reporter is out of touch not knowing someone who owns a pickup truck. While not a journalist responding, this tweet points out that according to data from auto sales tracker Good Car Bad Car, the statistic cited by Ekdahl is misleading:
While perhaps understandable that Davis didn’t include that tweet in his post because it wasn’t from a journalist. It does show that the idea that pickups are the most popular type of car in America is flawed; it’s just that there are less models of trucks, so truck sales are heavily concentrated. Plus with “the media” as we think of it heavily concentrated in New York, with its massive public transit system, it’s not entirely the most fair question.
Which isn’t to say that Ekdahl didn’t have legitimate point in what he was attempting to ask, especially in light of the election results. But this wasn’t necessarily the right question to make that point. That said, as more time passed, he started to give indications that he was, at least in some small part, trolling:
He also retweeted these:
[Photo: Shutterstock]
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