Don’t Blame Cable TV For Trump

Former cable news reporter Campbell Brown is out with a piece titled “Why I Blame TV for Trump.” As you can imagine, it places media coverage as the chief culprit in the rise of Trump’s candidacy, and eventually, his dominaiton of the Republican primaries:

Of course, by now, you’ve all also read the figure of close to $2 billion worth of free media the New York Times cited for Trump’s TV bonanza. And that story was back in March. No campaign’s advertising budget can compete.

So yes, I believe Trump’s candidacy is largely a creation of a TV media that wants him, or needs him, to be the central character in this year’s political drama. And it’s not just the network and cable executives driving it. The TV anchors and senior executives who don’t deliver are mercilessly ousted. The ones who do deliver are lavishly rewarded. I know from personal experience that it is common practice for TV anchors to have substantial bonuses written into their contracts if they hit ratings marks. With this 2016 presidential soap opera, they are almost surely hitting those marks. So, we get all Trump, all the time.

It’s comforting to think that the media — be it social media, cable television, whatever — somehow determines which candidate people will ultimately vote for. It would be nice to be able to draw a direct line between the amount Wolf Blitzer talks about Ted Cruz and then project out Cruz’s share of the vote. Lord knows there are plenty of people on Reddit who think that — based on their upvotes — there must be some conspiracy that’s preventing Bernie Sanders from winning the nomination.

But it’s not true.

Of course, television news has played a part in helping Donald Trump rise to the top of the polls. Giving someone the equivalent of a billion dollars worth of air time does have an effect. That kind exposure — whether positive or negative — helps build up your name recognition, let’s you get your message out, and allows you to control which issues are being debated. For example, the call to “build the wall” and not allow Muslims into this country (!!) would likely not have been as prominent of issues. From that perspective, sure, the CNNs of the world really did enable Trump.

But please. If a billion dollars in advertising led to victory, I would be still be able to buy a Pontiac or a case of Crystal-Clear Pepsi. At some point, the product has to perform. The idea that people somehow would have voted for Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio instead had they been the beneficiaries of another billion dollars in exposure does not stand up to reason or past experience.

That’s because the immediate dispersal of a candidate’s image and message through television and “mainstream” media is just one part of the equation. We’re talking about people who vote in political primaries (even in this highly visible 2016 cycle, that’s maybe only 40–50 million Americans) who rarely get their information from one source. Sure, television may still be king, but there’s Facebook, Twitter, Rush Limbaugh, and not to mention all your friends and family. The household you were raised in explains your vote far more than what Piers Morgan said last night.

Even then, only 11–12 million people at the end of the day will have voted for Donald Trump to be the Republican nominee. 250 million voting-age Americans were exposed to Trump in some fashion or other, and they went in a different direction. Only 5% of the voting-age population was so hypnotized by the precise and convincing coverage of Sean Hannity and Don Lemon that they went and physically voted for the guy.

No, the truth about television’s Trump addiction is that cable television is an insanely inefficient way of conveying political information. If you really wanted to learn about Donald Trump, you’d just Google his name. Sure, the news seeps in through passive ways. I’ve never sought out news about a royal wedding or the show Scandal, but it finds its way into my brain all the same.

But that’s the point. Cable news is entertainment. People are basing their votes on what Candy Crowley says as much as I base my vote on what John Oliver says. And I assure you, John Oliver is a much better journalist than Candy Crowley.

So, sure, maybe a billion dollars worth of exposure makes me consider Donald Trump more seriously. That’s why Coke and McDonald’s spend billions on advertising as well. But those are just suggestions. McDonald’s can make all the pitches it wants and put itself on every corner. If I want Five Guys instead, they lose.

Maybe someone like Noam Chomsky would argue that the media is “manufacturing consent” by offering some kind of legitimacy to Trump through their coverage. But if so, television news is doing a terrible job. The vast majority of people hate Donald Trump. He’s insanely unpopular. If you want to make the argument that CNN made people hate him, feel free to make that argument, but I don’t think that stands up well either. Twitter was doing plenty for him before cable news ever entered the picture. Even Fox News tried to pump the brakes plenty of times.

Like McDonald’s, no presidential candidate needs to appeal to everyone. The winner of both the Republican and Democratic primary processes will only need about 15 million votes in total to do so. That many Americans probably visit McDonald’s by the time I make it to work. You only need a small slice of the overall electorate to become your party’s nominee.

And that’s what Trump did. He secured a small but powerful slice of the electorate. Even in this hypothetical universe where cable news had “integrity” and maybe covered his rise in the polls at one-fifth the level they did, he still would have been a frontrunner. And besides, his rise really was newsworthy! Sure, if I were at the editorial helm, I would instruct my journalists to report the actual consequences of his policies, to actually test these propositions, and to not print anything that didn’t answer the real question of “how would you accomplish these things as President?”

(As an aside, don’t even get me started on why the number one question reporters ask isn’t, “How would you get Congress to pass these measures you’ve proposed?” The real journalistic malpractice in 2016 is perpetuating the myth that the President makes the laws.)

But in that universe where Trump was covered less or covered with some journalistic integrity, does Ted Cruz or John Kasich suddenly net an additional five million votes from people who already absorb information through a host of other sources? Again, my hunch is no.

Republican primary voters have had every opportunity to ditch Trump. It’s not like he just surged out of nowhere…he’s basically led all the Republican polls since last fall. Sure, I thought he was going to fade away eventually, but it wasn’t cable news that put that thought in my head.

No, the real source for the rise of Trump is a mobilization of people who have lost their comparative social, economic, and political power to new competitors domestic (women, people of color, LGBT, etc.) and abroad (China, Mexico, etc.). And when their own Republican party failed to restore that power even when they took back Congress, something snapped. They ran their own Speaker of the House out of town, and then they proceeded to vote down anyone with even a hint of responsibility for their current state of affairs.

Again, this is only around 20 million people, but in a system where the vast majority stay at home (or face substantive barriers to voting), you only need 20 million people for a revolution. Heck, if Bernie Sanders ended up getting 20 million people to vote for him in the primaries, he would have taken it in a landslide. The revolution really would be happening.

And that’s why people like Campbell Brown — who I know is really just trying to speak some truth to power here — seem to always get the chain of events wrong. The voters — dear God, the voters — are always the most important players in an election. That sounds so obvious it borders on condescension, but people constantly seek ways to try and explain away the honest, heartfelt beliefs that voters take into the primary booths.

The presidential primary process can be quite complicated, and there are ways to game the system, whether through the media, the money, the delegate process, or any other method. Those each have pernicious effects on their own. But who’s to blame for Donald Trump? Try about 12 million Americans who had a year to evaluate the candidates, took stock of their own place in society, and bothered to actually go out there and vote.

Until you understand that, you’re always going to be chasing ghosts, waiting for someone on television to struggle to explain to you what just happened.

David Jonas is a visionary policy analyst and one of the most talented hot-take political writers of his generation. Follow him on Twitter at @David_TSJ.