The Media Under Trump
…Trump is good for CBS — Les Moonves, 2016
In all the discussion around the rise of Donald Trump from reality TV show host to the Presidency, one player has been under-scrutinized and hardly held to account, and that is the mainstream media, especially liberal channels. In 2016, they handed Donald Trump $1 Billion in free airtime. Executives at the networks did this for one simple reason: ratings and money. The harsh reality is that the media thrived under Trump. He knew that and played right into their money-grubbing hands. The media created him, enabled him, and profited from his meteoric rise.
In my original essay, I spoke a great deal about narratives. I am pleased that more and more people, even other political commentators, are looking at the news media through the narrative lens. Trump’s use of the press during his presidential campaign and his presidency was genuinely revolutionary, and it exposed the relationship that the press has with the government and how unhealthy that relationship can become. Our media ecosystem is broken at best, but not precisely in the ways that one might expect. In this follow-up essay, I want to return to the idea of media narratives, but I also like to think about how the media changed under Trump and where that leaves us now.
Don’t like the Media? Blame Google
I will hear complaints about the media from both the Left and Right. For the Left, even channels like MSNBC are too corporate and too on board with capitalist, neoliberal agendas. For the Right, the mainstream media, except for Fox News, has become a liberal bias machine with a clearly anti-America agenda. If there is one thing Americans agree on is that the media sucks. Each side has its reasons, but everyone agrees that the media is a significant problem. Some of this is structural. Ronald Reagan relaxed the equal time regulations that kept news channels reasonably non-partisan. After that, channels could show clear, biased commentary, and our modern 24-hour news cycle was born. The networks raced to get viewers in the pre-internet era. The phrase, “If it bleeds, it leads,” came to describe the state of the standard evening news broadcast by the 1990s. The internet was supposed to fix all this, but it has exacerbated the problem.
The media is broken because it no longer chases issues, investigates, or does its job. It chases narratives. There’s a rot at the center of media today. The rot is endless commentary where there should be reportage and facts. Television news divisions famously do not make money, and in a corporate-owned media environment, that is simply unacceptable. TV News doesn’t have the budget to do the kind of reporting that once was common. Local news stations are all owned by three companies, and their budgets are slim compared to days gone by.
Newspapers have all but been destroyed by Big Tech, who have wholly sucked up all the revenue to be made from readers. Newspapers have lost ad revenue thanks to Google and Facebook, who take advantage of content for free with no share of revenue to outlets (although there are some early steps to change that). Google and Facebook control the digital advertising market. They have faltered where newspapers should have thrived with an inexpensive digital delivery system. To some degree, it was the relatively slow adoption of digital technology by newspapers and magazines and new competition from various quarters.
Traditional media often has difficulty keeping up in a world competing for eyeballs. Online platforms have democratized information and destroyed the business model, reducing resources for the kind of reporting needed.
The failures of modern media and Donald Trump’s media savvy combined to create a toxic electoral stew on which TV news divisions, newspapers, and magazines could thrive. Trump has always been familiar with creating moments that the media can’t help but cover. The media couldn’t cover Trump because rather than covering him as a demagogue or covering his crimes, they covered him like any other president, which normalized him as well as played right into his media-savvy hands. This was especially true once he was in office. The mainstream media often asks for unofficial transcriptionists for the government, but it was particularly bad during the Trump years. At the moment when we needed them to criticize the President most, they were often trumpeting his latest stunt and fueling the flames of division and hate.
Social Media and Presidential Campaigns
When Obama used social media to power his 2008 and 2012 presidential victories, the right was taken by surprise. Mitt Romney thought he didn’t tweet enough. However, the GOP, not to be out of business, began to study digital media, and by 2016, it had many more skills in the digital space. That’s where Steve Bannon came in. He got his start making indie films and eventually took over the popular right-wing news site Breitbart after the untimely death of its founder, Andrew Breitbart. Steve Bannon and, to a lesser degree, Roger Stone, went into the 2016 election with an agenda, and Donald Trump, who had grown popular with his promotion of the birtherism conspiracy about Obama, was right there to be their perfect foil.
2016 was an exciting election not just because of the eventual Republican nominee but because social media’s effect on the election was quite different than in 2008 or 2012. Social media’s effect was not to garner support but to generate outrage. This was a significant change from how Obama garnered support on social media.
Facebook groups to foment outrage politics, particularly on the Right but also on the Left, sprang up, and memes were shared in these groups. News stories (loosely defined as digital content) also abounded in these groups. Twitter became a hotbed because of Trump’s use of the platform, and that also created more outrage in politics, with people writing more extreme things and advocating for more extreme positions.
On top of that is the influence of foreign powers in the 2016 election. Between the involvement of the British company Cambridge Analytica and the participation of the Russian FSB in the social media space of the 2016 campaign, the narrative being pushed online did not support or denigrate either candidate. Instead, it focused on simply creating more divisive outrage. This online outrage began to spill into the real world thanks to the online commentary and how TV news covered the 2016 and 2020 elections.
Trump was the ideal media candidate because while he was well-known for his tweets and his 2 am tweet storms, he valued what was being said on TV, even on shows he did not like (Morning Joe, Rachel Maddow), and that put the TV and the TV narratives back in the driver’s seat. Thanks to people moving away from TV news, the dialogue has shifted to the digital space, but Trump brought TV back into the forefront.
The primacy of TV, especially on Fox News and all the networks, gained Trump $1 billion in free media advertising in 2016, which the Clinton campaign simply couldn’t keep up with. In 2020, Trump had the privilege of being President. Incumbency is always helpful. It is a minor miracle that Joe Biden overcame his advantages. Trump knows how to play the media perfectly and has been doing it since the 1980s. Trump could get and stay on TV, and the press would frequently talk about his latest tweets, giving them an even larger audience than his 30 million plus audience on Twitter.
Manipulation
2016 revealed to us how outsiders can influence American presidential elections. It was a dark moment for Trump to ask the Russians for help in the election. They seemed to oblige with more social media manipulation. In a Frontline expose, they demonstrated how the Russian FSB service would create accounts to bomb comment sections and create Facebook pages and groups to galvanize support on both sides and push forward agendas. It had little to do with real support but more outrage politics. It is not clear that the Trump campaign was directly working with Russia to shift the outcome of the election in 2016. It appears that quite the reverse occurred in 2020.
In 2020, the federal government was committed to not repeating the mistakes of 2016. This led to extraordinary efforts to identify and take down accounts connected to foreign powers over the 2020 election cycle. Matt Taibbi, in his reportage on the Twitter Files, shows that the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI were in regular contact with Twitter and would send over the list of accounts that they wanted banning for being under foreign influence, even when the evidence linking those accounts to foreign actors was scant.
The connection between Twitter and the federal government would have likely never been revealed. Still, because Elon Musk purchased Twitter, he has chosen to reveal the internal memos that show how the government was set up against certain accounts and then made the leap into getting accounts taken down for narratives that they did not like, including “anti-Ukraine” narratives and “vaccine hesitancy” narratives. These agencies acted this way from the end of the Trump administration and into the Biden administration.
Matt Taibbi coined a term, the “Censorship-Industrial Complex,” to describe the group of agencies, NGOs, and other organizations trying to stop “misinformation” from spreading online. The fear of misinformation had been a problem in 2016, and the pandemic amplified these fears.
Misinformation is genuine; however, in our zeal to stop misinformation, people’s free speech rights have been trampled in the name of “public safety.” History shows that when a government does things in the name of “public safety,” it rarely ends well for the public in question.
In his capacity as Attorney General, Bill Barr neutered the effect of the Mueller Report by issuing a letter the day it came out saying that there was “no collusion” with Russia on behalf of the Trump campaign and left it at that. Conversely, Hillary Clinton bought the Steele Dossier that was filled with lies about Trump, including the infamous “pee tape.” As it turns out, nothing in that report had any actual veracity. Both instances count as manipulation of the media as the mere mention of the suspicion that these things might be true gets blended through the mainstream media into the online ecosystem. Like a bad game of telephone, the narrative shifts rapidly as people pile on.
Misinformation was also a factor in the pandemic, and embarrassingly, much of what was once considered misinformation has often come out to be true. One of the vanguards on this, at least as far as the pandemic goes, was Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, who asked questions about the pandemic’s origins and the vaccine’s efficacy. Even a famous YouTube doctor, ZDoggMD, asked about pandemic policies and vaccines.
The question here is simple: what is misinformation? What is simply a theory? What is free speech? Does all information truly harm people?
The Media We Deserve
It is no secret that we are not well-served by our current media environment. This complaint is not new either. As networks competed in the 1980s and 1990s for ratings share for their evening news broadcasts and sought to make money off the ever-unprofitable news divisions, a new mandate arose, “if it bleeds, it leads.” The most sensational news stories rose to the top and were less spectacular, although equally essential stories were either not covered at all or were covered later and with less airtime.
If we had the news media we deserved, we would have a robust media eco-system that did not merely serve as a transcriptionist for the government but would look at every government policy, regardless of party, with a critical eye. Reporters would not shy away from scandal but instead lean into it and expose it to the public for accountability like old muckrakers. A proper media system would not focus on clickbait but on matters that affect people’s lives.
If there is one thing I know, it’s hard to get people to pay attention to “boring” stories. For example, in 2023, a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, spilling toxic waste everywhere. The story about the train was sensational and exciting. A story about the braking system that may have prevented the disaster is much less exciting. This is true across all sorts of news stories. As someone who has spent much of my life doing the news, I know how hard it can be to get people to pay attention to real stories. My most viral video is a video from 2015 where I am talking about college men having sex with each other while not considering themselves gay. That video hit the front page of a college video site and did tremendous numbers. Never mind the viral article I wrote on Genetically Modified Foods or any other great pieces I wrote (many of which appear in this book), my biggest pieces have to do with Television or sex. It doesn’t matter if I am writing or appearing on camera; it is always a struggle to get my attention to stories that aren’t salacious.
There was a time when the news was mainly to serve the public good and earnest people with a severe idea about what was going on; society would create news broadcasts and newspaper stories that would not merely sell advertising but also bring the public’s attention to important matters of the day. This is very difficult to do now. People have the option not to click on a story, and in that way, people can simply opt out of the news. In a competition for advertising dollars, the content that pays gets published, and everything else merely falls away. The digital content problem circles back to one of the problems with Google and the modern advertising ecosystem.
When the primary content discovery platforms like Facebook, Google, and other social platforms decide who can see what through algorithms and big data, it is no longer the media making the decisions about what goes it; it’s the tech companies. Jaron Lanier and other experts have complained about tech control over our media, and the issues we have as a society with narratives around the pandemic and January 6th are emblematic of the problem. Should the government try to solve that problem? No, that is a violation of the First Amendment. Still, there is room for a certain amount of regulation regarding sharing advertising revenue and how these companies share content that could help improve our media ecosystem.
The Real Job of the Fourth Estate
Our modern media ecosystem is an amalgam of a few institutions. We have the media companies themselves getting ever more consolidated, and we have the social media companies that have more control over who sees what content than ever before. On top of that, we have efforts from the government to control the narrative directly via social media, according to the Twitter files.
The media should be keeping our elected officials accountable. That is the primary job of the press. It should also inform the public about matters that affect us all, from the local to the national levels. However, we live in a media ecosystem that lives in narrative rather than any reflection of reality. That unmoored sense people feel around the media narrative is authentic.
In his documentary HyperNormalization, Adam Curtis talks about this effect in the former Soviet Union and how people knew that what was being said on the news and by the government was a lie but chose to accept it anyway because that is all that there was to experience. Reality came knocking in 1991 as the Soviet Union fell apart and ceased to be a political entity as they had known it. Adam Curtis shows that a similar method is being employed in the West. Our modern media ecosystem has very little reality, specifically not online. No matter how much people try to expose the “great lie,” it persists because enough people still believe in it.
The reality is that we do not have to live this way. It will take work to dismantle, but we can return to reality in our society. This is an area where the media can lead the way, but only if people demand it. Rather than hiding in ever-more partisan corners of the media ecosystem, we can and should demand a fair media that reports on things that matter to people and holds elected officials, regardless of party, accountable for their actions on behalf of the people. That is the real job of the fourth estate, and it is time for the people to demand that level of action from the media.
