The 3 Reasons Donald Trump Won the Media
The Books That Explain Trump’s Rise Have Already Been Written
This is the first article in a series. Read the second installment (“The Wages of Propaganda Is Cynicism, or, Why Melania’s Plagiarism Doesn’t Matter, but Leaked DNC Emails Do”) here.
Informed — and correct — opinion has it that Donald Trump will be accepting the Republican nomination for President Thursday night in part because he received wildly disproportionate media coverage throughout the Republican primary season.
Informed — and correct — opinion has it that the news media disproportionately covered Trump in large part because as old business models decay, desperate corporations shamelessly sought the profit that came along with Trump-induced ratings to relieve their financial pressures.
But informed opinion doesn’t go far enough.
One of the best writers on the operational principles of modern mass media described a certain infamous American politician as “a natural genius at creating reportable happenings that had an interestingly ambiguous relation to underlying reality.”
He had a diabolical fascination and an almost hypnotic power over news‑hungry reporters. They were somehow reluctantly grateful to him for turning out their product. They stood astonished that he could make so much news from such meager raw material. Many hated him; all helped him…[he] and the newsmen both thrived on the same synthetic commodity.
[His] political fortunes were promoted almost as much by newsmen who considered themselves his enemies as by those few who were his friends. Without the active help of all of them he could never have created the pseudo‑events which brought him notoriety and power. Newspaper editors, who self‑righteously attacked [his] “collaborators,” themselves proved worse than powerless to cut him down to size. Even while they attacked him on the editorial page inside, they were building him up in front-page headlines. Newspapermen were his most potent allies, for they were his co-manufacturers of pseudo-events. They were caught in their own web. Honest newsmen and the unscrupulous [politician] were in separate branches of the same business.
Fifty-five years ago, historian Daniel Boorstin wrote the above sentences about Senator Joseph McCarthy in the first chapter of The Image, a book I routinely assign to students interested in the workings of modern media.
Boorstin chose his example well. Time Magazine denounced McCarthy as a demagogue, but it did so with McCarthy’s face on its cover — selling copy for Time while helping the Senator maintain national prominence.
Donald Trump is not Joe McCarthy, and the business model of 1950s news media is not that of the 21st century. Yet Boorstin described the same dynamic that gave such striking salience earlier this year to the remarks of Leslie Moonves, Executive Chairman and CEO of CBS, cheering Trump on (“Go Trump!”) for the sake of increased profit. At a conference sponsored by Morgan Stanley, what is usually communicated by figures like Moonves in private was soon made public.
“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS. [laughs] The money’s rolling in…”
— Leslie Moonves on Donald Trump, as reported by Paul Bond in The Hollywood Reporter
Thus the accepted narrative about Trump and the media runs along the lines that Lee Fang, who highlighted Moonves’s remarks from a meeting with investors in The Intercept, outlined in December:
Trump in particular has formed a symbiotic relationship with the media. Although he hasn’t paid for many ads yet, the real estate mogul’s bombastic comments and hateful rhetoric have provided record-shattering ratings for news networks, which have in turn provided non-stop coverage for his campaign.
The primary debates have subsided, but the “non-stop coverage” continues.
At the New York Times, Jim Rutenberg at Mediator called it the“Mutual Dependence of Donald Trump and the News Media, eventually declaring that “The Republican Horse Race is Over, and Journalism Lost.” At the Washington Post, John Sides at Monkey Cage presented the argument: “Why is Donald Trump Surging? Blame the Media” and again in “A Deep Dive into the News Media’s Role in the Rise of Donald J. Trump.”
As Luke Thompson and others have shown, there is no question that Trump’s rising poll numbers trailed his billions of dollars in free coverage from struggling news media corporations. As Thompson says, the coverage of The Donald is indeed in some sense a sign of desperation, and “the death rattle of TV news.”
Even if one adopted the stance of a right wing conspiracy theorist who believed in a left wing media conspiracy to help make Donald Trump the Republican nominee and then sink him in the general election, the extent of the media coverage of Donald Trump even as those covering him note and decry it does not does not measure up.
I hope you all are proud of yourselves. The guy wanted to give his hotel business a boost and now we are praying that Cleveland makes it through July.
— President Barak Obama, to the press, on Donald Trump, 2016 White House Correspondents Dinner
As in Senator Joe McCarthy’s case over sixty years ago, one of the “stories” that the media began to tell about Donald Trump was the all too true story of how it can’t stop running stories about Trump.
Boorstin teaches us why. The dysfunctional relationship between The Donald and the press is no doubt exacerbated by the ever-changing landscape of modern media, in which old business models are currently decaying. Yet this dysfunction is caused by more than short term profit seeking by Big Corporate: this harmful dynamic is embedded in the very operational structure of modern mass media itself.
By “mass media” I mean our ever-increasing means of communicating to ever-increasing numbers of people increasingly quickly and continuously since the industrial revolution began, from the use of the telegraph and the radio to Twitter and live-streaming video.
The rise of mass media over the last century has created a new set of operational principles of power for American civic and cultural life.
Sadly, most of us are wholly ignorant of them. They are not systematically taught. We reveal the depths of our ignorance when we assume that because technology advances so quickly, there could not possibly be operational principles of rhetoric that extend from the telegraph to Twitter when, in fact, there are marked similarities between the two. We reveal the depths of our ignorance when we act as if the Kardashians were something new, when in fact they are an old phenomenon that Boorstin explained in the early 1960s — by looking to his past.
Yet our republic depends upon our ability to deliberate as a people about what ought to be done: to the extent we are not able to effectively evaluate or participate in modern rhetoric, or the art of persuasion — to the extent we do not recognize the means and methods of modern rhetoric — we will cease to be free. Make no mistake: what we are examining when we examine modern media is nothing less than the workings of modern rhetoric. These tools of human communication constitute new means of practicing the old art of rhetoric, for good and ill. Since we do not, as a culture, bother to teach ourselves the traditional and universal liberal art of persuasion, we are woefully unprepared to systematically evaluate modern variations on the same.
In truth, the expert use of mass media is the silent ring of Gyges (or Sauron, if you prefer) for deliberative democracy, and the temptation to use it over the last hundred years has, to take but one prominent example, changed the very nature of the presidency itself, making the modern “rhetorical presidency” possible, or perhaps inevitable.
In the first century of the American republic Presidents rarely spoke directly to the people while in office and almost never while campaigning, since it was considered ignoble and dangerous: it was understood by all as likely to lead to demagoguery. But as the industrial revolution picked up its pace the rise of new means of communication constituted far too great an occasion of sin for mortal men to resist grasping for the ring.
Whether one thinks of Barak Obama, consulting with Hollywood moguls to craft his image and narrative after he leaves office years before the fact; or Ronald Reagan, known to the public as a long time host of a popular television show even after his years as a recognized actor; or Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s effective use of radio “fireside chats”; or Woodrow Wilson running the first campaign advertisement using video in 1912; it is clear that as our political leaders have increasingly used the ring they have warped the Presidency while driving the development of new methods to move the madding crowd.
The technology that constitutes the ring arose out of the commercial republics of the western world, within which, in normal conditions, a veil covers the profitable relationship between those working within media corporations and the public figures they cover. When it is public knowledge, however, that those who work in the media oppose the views or actions of someone they unceasingly cover, and it is also clear to all that their coverage is helping rather than hurting that person, that veil is, at least, partially lifted.
This is what we see happening in Trump’s wake. Trump frequently points out the underlying media dynamics at play, outrageously lifting the veil even as he simultaneously practices the techniques that give him billions in free media coverage.
But how, exactly, does Trump draw such coverage and ratings?
The books explaining his rise have already been written.
In the three articles that follow, leading up to Trump’s speech on Thursday, I will lay out three of those operating principles, applying three books of the last century, written by three men who have each passed away, to Donald Trump’s unforeseen rise to become the Republican nominee for President: Propaganda (1928) by Edward Bernays, the godfather of public relations, explains the overarching phenomenon and the strategy required to use the “news”; The Image (1962), by historian Daniel Boorstin, reveals the central, driving force that propels the “news”; and Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), by New York University Professor Neil Postman, describes how entertainment masquerades as “news” in increasingly video-based mediums.
Whatever his prospects for attaining the presidency, the uncomfortable truth is that Donald Trump is not an anomaly, but a result of a logical progression or the evolution of modern media. The uncomfortable truth is that we ought not have been surprised at his rise, for Donald J. Trump is both the ultimate expression and master of modern media.
