Trump is Winning the Information War
Coverage of Trump’s manufactured border crisis shows that the media still hasn’t figured out how to deal with him
January hasn’t exactly been the best month of Trump’s presidency.
First came the (accidental) revelation that his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort had shared internal polling data with suspected Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik during the 2016 presidential campaign, providing what may be the strongest evidence yet of coordination between members of Trump’s team and Russian officials. A short time after that story broke, we learned that Trump’s former lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen had agreed to testify publicly before Congress, prompting comparisons to John Dean’s testimony during Watergate.
Just days later, a bombshell New York Times report revealed for the first time that U.S. intelligence officials considered Trump’s behavior so concerning that the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into whether the president was compromising national security by acting as an agent of Russia. Next came a Washington Post report detailing Trump’s extensive efforts to conceal what he discussed during several face-to-face meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin, even going as far as hiding those discussions from officials in his own administration.
Taken together, these developments made the first two weeks of the month the most significant since the start of the Russia investigation. And while these stories (rightly) made headlines, none of them dominated their respective news cycles. There is no historical parallel for this—at least not in the United States. Each of the stories above would have, in any other presidency, utterly monopolized coverage. Imagine hearing during the Obama or Bush years that their own intelligence agencies worried they might be acting on behalf of foreign powers. Such a bombshell would have been nuclear. Not so with this president. In the last couple of weeks, each time a major story broke, Trump or other members of his administration jumped in front of the cameras to make an announcement about Trump’s demand for border wall funding or the government shutdown it spawned. And each time, the media was there for it, all too willing to redirect their focus.
When Trump announced on January 7 that he would be delivering a live Oval Office address the following night to talk about the government shutdown, the same one he’s using as leverage to get funding for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, networks scrambled to figure out how to cover the speech — not whether to cover it, but how.
A somewhat paradoxical debate took place over the next few hours, with news outlets simultaneously claiming that they had to cover Trump’s address because it would be news, while also publicly weighing their options for fact-checking the lies they anticipated he would tell. Some networks discussed whether to cover the event live (or on a delay), with real-time fact-checking, while others floated the idea of running a special fact-checking segment immediately following the address. Network executives, in other words, knew Trump would use the time to spread disinformation, yet they still considered the speech newsworthy enough to cover by virtue of the fact that it was delivered by the president — the same president who regularly wages war on the press, and who has lied with increasing frequency since taking office.
Ultimately, all the major network news stations and most cable news outlets decided to interrupt their regular programming to air the address live. And as expected, Trump didn’t make any news, but he did deliver a lot of lies. According to one estimate, Trump averaged one false claim every 34 seconds for the duration of his nearly 10-minute speech. Most networks made some attempt to fact-check his claims, but by that point the damage was done.
Less than two weeks later, Trump was back on the air promising to deliver a “major announcement” about the border wall during a live address Saturday evening.
When Fact-Checking Fails
As I wrote just before the address started, fact-checking is better than no fact-checking — but the best option is not to broadcast the lies in the first place. While fact-checking does have value, it is limited in its potential to change minds and is often not even effective in correcting false beliefs.
Furthermore, by broadcasting Trump’s lies to millions of people, news networks increased the likelihood that at least some of those people will believe at least some of those lies, even if the broadcast was accompanied by thorough fact-checking. A growing body of research has called into question the effectiveness of fact-checking, especially in situations involving polarized issues and strongly held beliefs. As Tulane University political scientist Celeste Lay explains, fact-checking has inherent value in terms of correcting the record and establishing a foundation of objective truths, but putting the truth out there doesn’t necessarily mean people will be any more likely to accept it.
“Fact-checking organizations may provide a public good in their attempts to correct the record,” Lay said, “but we should not expect them to lead to a more accurately informed public.”
That’s because people often process information and make decisions based on emotions, biases, and preexisting beliefs, rather than facts. When it comes to political information, especially with polarized topics such as immigration, people tend to seek out and cling to information that confirms or is consistent with their belief systems, while tuning out or discounting conflicting information — regardless of whether or not the information is true. Partisan affiliation and group membership also influence how people process information, to the point that accepting or rejecting certain facts becomes a symbol of group solidarity rather than an assessment of truthfulness.
On issues like immigration, group dynamics play a particularly important role in influencing the appraisal of information. As long-term demographic changes continue to reshape the ethnic and racial composition of the U.S. population, white Americans are expressing increased support for actions aimed at minimizing the social and political power of non-white Americans. Among the policies that have gained support from white Americans in recent years are new restrictions on immigration and stricter requirements for citizenship. At the same time, nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment are on the rise, and the group identity of white Americans is becoming a more salient factor in political decision-making. When presented with information about immigrants or immigration patterns, white Americans with a strong group identity are more likely to evaluate the information in terms of how it aligns with existing group beliefs. In other words, an individual’s decision to accept or reject Trump’s claims about immigration has less to do with the truthfulness of the statement as it does with advancing group interests.
In this epistemic environment, simply stating factual information, especially when it contradicts deeply-held beliefs, is often not enough to combat the spread and impact of misinformation. Even when people are presented with the same set of facts, they can be interpreted in entirely different ways depending on ideological positions, group identities, belief systems, and more. So if the media plans to use fact-checking to counter Trump’s incessant lies, they are setting us all up for failure.
Mistakes From the Past
In many ways, coverage of Trump’s two immigration speeches this month mirrored the type of coverage he received as a candidate — and for anyone who cares about improving public discourse, cleaning up our information landscape, and stopping the spread of misinformation and disinformation, that should come as a alarming sign.
Trump knows how to manipulate and dominate a media cycle, but the media still has no idea what to do with Trump.
In a series of reports analyzing media coverage during the 2016 presidential election, researchers at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy documented how the press failed to fulfill its duty of informing the public, and instead ended up providing a platform for Trump to peddle propaganda and set the agenda for the media. The report’s most consistent finding was that Trump received a disproportionate amount of media coverage, even when his poll numbers didn’t warrant the attention:
During the early stages of the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump was the center of press attention. Each month from the time he announced his candidacy until he received his party’s presidential nomination, he was the most heavily covered candidate. It wasn’t even close. During that period, Trump received 63 percent of the coverage compared to 37 percent for his most heavily covered rival.
The general election period continued the pattern. Week after week, Trump got more press attention than did Clinton. Overall, Trump received 15 percent more coverage than she did. Trump also had more opportunities to define Clinton than she had to define him. When a candidate was seen in the news talking about Clinton, the voice was typically Trump’s and not hers. Yet when the talk was about Trump, he was again more likely to be the voice behind the message. “Lock her up” and “make America great again” were heard more often in the news than “he’s unqualified” and “stronger together.”
According to the study, nearly all major news outlets covered Trump’s campaign in “a way that was unusual given his initial polling numbers.” And he didn’t just get a greater volume of coverage — he also benefited from coverage that was mostly positive in tone:
When his news coverage began to shoot up, he was not high in the trial-heat polls and had raised almost no money. Upon entering the race, he stood much taller in the news than he stood in the polls. By the end of the invisible primary, he was high enough in the polls to get the coverage expected of a frontrunner. But he was lifted to that height by an unprecedented amount of free media.
The report went on to explain how Trump’s attention-seeking personality and ability to produce soundbite-worthy clips appealed to reporters and media executives looking to break through the noise of the 24/7 news cycle: “Journalists are attracted to the new, the unusual, the sensational — the type of story material that will catch and hold an audience’s attention.”
“Trump is arguably the first bonafide media-created presidential nominee,” the report concluded. “Although he subsequently tapped a political nerve, journalists fueled his launch.”
And now, more than three years after Trump announced his candidacy, the same style of media coverage that helped put him in the White House is helping him evade accountability and distract the public from a constant string of scandals that would have brought other presidencies to an end by now.
The Agenda-Setting Power of the Press—and the President
While most of us like to believe we are independent thinkers, the truth is that we rely on the media for cues regarding what to think about, how to think about it, and when to shift our attention elsewhere.
This gives the media immense power to set the agenda for the nation. This phenomenon operates at multiple levels. At the first level, agenda setting signals to the public which issues hold importance — and, by extension, which issues are worthy of our attention. Research shows that issues given high priority in the media are assigned more weight by the public. In second-level agenda setting, the media signals how the public should think about the issues deemed important by emphasizing particular attributes of those issues. And regardless of whether coverage of an issue is positive, negative, or neutral, the sheer volume of it conveys the message that the topic at hand is worthy of attention.
In other words, the media has the power to tell us what to think about, as well as how to think about it. But since the start of Trump’s campaign, the media’s agenda-setting role has been diminished — because Trump has taken control of it.
When Trump delivered his primetime address, he was putting on a performance and his words were only part of it. The speech was the first Oval Office address of Trump’s presidency, so by default it was assigned an undue degree of seriousness and importance. The performative element of a president interrupting regular programming to deliver a fear-based message about a manufactured “crisis” was far more salient than anything conveyed in the message itself. Millions of Americans watched the address, and the message they received was that whatever Trump said, regardless of its accuracy, was worthy of attention. But was it? Well, consider what Americans didn’t hear about during that same time period.
From January 8 through January 15 — a week during which some of the most significant developments in the Russia investigation became known — Trump’s border wall fight and the associated government shutdown topped the charts on Google.
In a comparison of five Google search terms—“Manafort,” “FBI,” “Russia,” “border wall,” and “government shutdown”—the keyword that garnered the most attention by far was “government shutdown.” The second most popular search term, “border wall,” peaked on January 8, the day Trump gave his Oval Office address.
In the end, Trump managed to get network executives to interrupt primetime programming so he could broadcast propaganda into the homes of millions of Americans and completely reset the news cycle. By the time he started speaking, the Oval Office address was dominating the headlines, and it continued to do so for the remainder of the evening and into the next news cycle.
It wasn’t just the amount of coverage, either. When Trump gave his second address on Saturday, the media fell into the all-too-familiar “both sides” trap, presenting the two sides of the border wall/shutdown debate as if Trump’s demand for a border wall is just as reasonable as Democrats’ demand to open the federal government. And on Google News, the top search results using the keyword “Trump immigration address” were almost exclusively right-wing news sources.
The Power of Propaganda
2019, so far, has given us a series of groundbreaking news reports about scandals, crimes, and other misdeeds that could ultimately change the course of Trump’s presidency, but it also brought a repeat of the same style of media coverage that derailed the 2016 campaign cycle.
One of the reasons Trump has so effectively gamed the media is that the tactics he uses are new — and they’re also imported from Russia’s own disinformation playbook, which RAND Corporation calls the Russian “Firehose of Falsehood.”
As described by RAND, the key features of effective Russian propaganda are “high numbers of channels and messages” and “a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions.” In Russia, Putin can rely on state-controlled news outlets to peddle his propaganda to the masses, but America still has a free press — yet right now, that free press is giving Trump a free pass. Over time, this lowers public expectations regarding the truthfulness of lawmakers, which ultimately creates a situation where lying is just the status quo and the line between truth and fiction is erased.
It’s the job of the media to make sure this doesn’t happen.
Trump will likely never stop lying, nor will he stop using the media to distract from the scandals that are engulfing his presidency. As chaotic as it may seem, there is a method to the madness: By repeating his lies and getting news outlets to broadcast them to the public on a regular basis, Trump is overwhelming audiences with a barrage of countermessaging intended to distract from his missteps. The media’s complicity is in taking it seriously, which implies his lies are worthy of our attention.
This is the same playbook Trump used in 2016. He won the information war in 2016, and he hasn’t stopped winning it since. If 2020 is going to be different, we need a new model of media coverage — and fact-checking Trump after broadcasting his lies to millions of people won’t cut it. New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen believes the media should suspend normal relations with Trump. Ultimately, Rosen does not see a one-size-fits-all solution; newsrooms will have to discern how best to negotiate the unfortunate reality that our president is a manifestly “bad actor.”
My Arc Digital colleague Berny Belvedere makes a similar point:
I see fact-checking as an appropriate measure for candidates and politicians who are constitutionally capable of abiding by norms and truth-telling. Fact-checking and basic point/counterpoint coverage is almost adorable in its willingness to impose a code of conduct, a commitment to norms, that Trump himself laughs off.
As RAND advises, “Don’t expect to counter the firehose of falsehood with the squirt gun of truth.” Instead of responding directly to propaganda messages and disinformation, analysts recommend exposing the method behind the madness. “Highlight the ways propagandists attempt to manipulate audiences, rather than fighting the specific manipulations.”
Adopting new and vibrant strategies for countering Trump’s undying commitment to disinformation will not only help the press fulfill its duty to the public, but could benefit the profession as well. The effectiveness of state-sanctioned propaganda is fueled in part by its ability to erode the credibility of the press, toward which Trump has proven to be quite adept. But if the media is willing to adopt new models of coverage to combat the onslaught of disinformation, the firehose will eventually run dry— and perhaps most importantly, trust in the media will ultimately be restored.
