“Dancing with the Stars” — The White House edition
Looking back on everything that has happened over the last 15 months, one can say that this year’s presidential election is outstanding in the history of the USA. Even for European standards, there has been an extraodrinary media attention on the two leading candidates. Whether it was Clinton’s email affair or Trump’s shocking comments on migrants or women — at the end of the campaign, there was little that could have shocked the population on both sides of the Atlantic. But after all the disbelief that followed the voting results, we shouldn’t ask ourselves what the world will look like in four years time because there is nobody who could answer this. Instead, we should wonder about an entirely different question: Was the media entertainment worth the actual consequences?
“So in the US we have a huge media problem, the media will report everything in a biased way and that happens on both sides, conservative and liberal. This causes the two sides to turn on each other even more than usual. The media made our election into a circus and people treated it like voting for their favourite contestant on Dancing with the Stars, not as a legitimate job placement for President of the USA,” says a friend of mine who lives near Springfield, Illinois, one of only four central American states that have voted for Clinton. “By the time we got to the election, there was no good choice, Hillary is corrupt and rigged the Democratic primary to become their nominee and Donald Trump who has no political experience and is definitely not a politician. So, for the last year, Americans have been riled up by the media about what will happen if either one becomes president.”
Putting the American election into a more international context, we can detect several parallels to the Brexit campaign of Britain’s Ukip party. In both cases, there was more focus on emotional statements than actual facts, e.g. immigration and economy. On migrants, Trump claims that “they’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists” when it comes to Mexicans. Meanwhile, “[Clinton] offers only more taxing, regulating, more spending and more wealth redistribution — a future of slow growth, declining incomes, and dwindling prosperity.” None of these predictions are substantiated by statistics or facts. They’re nothing but fictional claims, made up versions of a possible outcome intended to stoke existential fears in the rapidly decreasing American middle class. While it makes for a very unsubstantial political campaign, the entertainment level is much higher than the grey reality and boring facts.
In Britain, people believed Nigel Farage’s lie that he would invest £350 million in the NHS rather than experts warning that Brexit would cause an economic disaster for Britain in the foreseeable future. The reason? Emotions! It is much more comfortable to think about the positive outcomes rather than the negative ones if one doesn’t belong to the wealthier part of the population. Emotions are sidetracking from facts and they make it easy to forget that not every promise might be just as easy to fulfil as it is uttered. However, in a privatised media system as dependent on ratings as the American one, emotions guarantee mass audiences, which guarantee a high placement on the TV market.
Entertainment programmes such as “Dancing with the Stars” are all about your favourite contestant, a competition similar in its construction to a sport event. Nobody really cares about dance talent as long as the star is entertaining and gets away with it. If it was about impressive dance routines, we’d see trained professionals whirling over the dance floor and it would be down to the jury alone to decide who wins and not the audience who, in most cases, hasn’t got a clue when it comes to dancing technique. And when my friend compares the presidency election to this form of entertainment TV, I have to agree with her. The entertainment was questionable since the professionalism of the “contestants” was highly debatable, but the media decided to turn it into a competition. The consequences have always been secondary. Maybe due to a lack of long sightedness, maybe due to reasons communication scientists have yet to determine.
If we can gain something positive from the 2016 election, it should be for the media to not treat serious topics as entertainment in order to establish a better market position. In the end, there is one important difference when comparing entertainment to elections that many US voters and also the media have missed: We don’t get to switch off the TV afterwards and forget about anything that has happened in the last 90 minutes. We don’t get to say “It was fun while it lasted” and now we go back to minding our own businesses. We have to face the consequences of it as soon as we switch channels and watch on as our favourite TV star “makes America great again”.
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