I’m not a Trump fanboy but in looking at Trump’s media teflon it’s at least the equivalent of whatever Reagan possessed and then some. In this context I also look at the nature of reporting over the past 10+ years where every other story is reporting on how this missed step or that past statement spells the end of a person’s career, or is so outrageous the world might stop spinning. And the media had the powers that be well trained to step to this tune. Everyone would be very, very careful about what they said about anything and apologize massively for the slightest misstep.
Then Trump came along and said “Fuck em’” and the media poured the outrage on. It was a “This will not stand!” outrage a day. And yet Trump still won because people did not care anymore about the media’s opinion. The constant “outrage” had burned people out and the media’s power to make or break with outrage pronouncements is at a pretty weak ebb right now. The Media Emperor has no clothes in terms of directing opinion because it has squandered so much credibility on being perpetually outraged.
I’d agree with this. The “these are the two least popular candidates of all time” balance also didn’t help Clinton or her perceived honesty. Trump made an effort to treat the media badly, and the media reported every time Trump brushed his teeth or his opinions on anything.
It’s not hard to dismiss most what gets reported in the mainstream media these days after you get past the point of understanding they really have nothing but their own best interests in mind.
One would expect not just organized/mainstream media but in general the whole social media Online Shaming environment to have created a state of outrage overload – except that you ***still ***see people reacting to different fauxrages and retweeting/sharing/forwarding them reflexively.
But yeah, Trump took advantage that for a large number of people, being the Guy Who Is Out Of F***s To Give is admirable.
(I once wondered, what with mass 24/7 web/social media presence would there come a point when so many people would have something “embarassing” about them floating around the network that the common threat “this will come back to bite you when an employer looks you up 15 years from now” would become toothless. Especially when people started standing up and saying, “yes, so what?”)
Back when the Trump run was just getting started, I was among the ones who was annoyed at how he was getting an extraordinary amount of free airtime just for being alive and breathing, as it were, with the news crews hanging on to whatever he may spout however mundane, while 18 other people probably ***needed ***to shoot someone in 5th Avenue to even get noticed. The news operations thought they had found themselves a clown show to make a spectacle of and have fun with while the Serious People competed for the election. We know who’s laughing now.
I agree that a large portion of the electorate has ignored or dismissed news media reporting about Trump. How much of that is due to contempt/dislike of journalists as opposed to determined wearing of blinders about their candidate, I can’t say.
At some point, the emperor-elect’s nakedness will become obvious to many more people (despite what he thinks, there’s a limit to how much his supporters will put up with). Meantime, responsibility and professionalism in the news media will be best served by simply reporting what Trump does and its implications, while leaving acerbic commentary to the editorial page.
Resisting the temptation to editorialize in the middle of news reporting will be difficult, obviously. Revealing quote from a N.Y. Times story about the Carrier deal: “…Trump insisted that the agreement was a real accomplishment, not just a combination of political showmanship and tax breaks.” (byline, Nelson D. Schwartz). Nope, no editorializing there. :dubious:
No. The media gave a huge amount of attention to crass and distasteful comments he made; like on Megan Kelly, the whole garb em tape and on Ted Cruz’s father and therefore exhausted their powder for his actual honest to goodness bad things he said.
The media heavily* favored *Trump, playing down or ignoring his misdeeds, giving him lots of free airtime and relentlessly smearing Hillary at every turn. He’s just so horrible that even with a media heavily slanted towards him, he looked terrible.
It made no difference. Trump voters were always going to vote that way, and no strategy of outrage management was going to change that. They’d been programmed to hate Hillary for the past couple of decades. One might as well ask if they could change someone’s religion.
Ultimately I think the election came down to enthusiasm. Trump’s supporters may have been largely a fixed group, but he also got them to vote. The media gave Trump all the attention he needed and every outrage got him more screen time. It’s just the old saying of “no such thing as bad publicity” at work.
Yes. Where it counted, Trump got on the good side of the “enthusiasm gap” - his base was highly motivated to get out there and vote, pumped up by the image of the guy who speaks from his gut, intending to show up the media and the experts who kept loudly complaining about how horrid he was and they were. And it turned out, all he needed was to just do same or only slightly better than recent Republican candidates to wind up ahead, where it counted.
I thought it was hilarious, the media getting a reality check. So many people live in their own reality distortion fields that filter’s out what they don’t want to acknowledge.
It’s like everyone’s mom used to say “just be yourself”. Fake people are amusing but no one really likes them. We all probably know at least one person that is fake, that can’t just be true to themselves.
This may be the first concrete evidence of the Multiverse Hypothesis in theoretical physics.
One might argue that the media overdid the “horserace” aspect with false-equivalency wrt Hillary, but the media was so anti-Trump it was pathetic. The news stories were overwhelmingly negative. Lots of people just didn’t care.
The media will be here for a very very long time. Trump? Four years (maybe).
I think his mouthpieces should be more careful about who is digging whose grave.
BUT the notion of how the person who does not care about how he’s portrayed has an advantage, may outlive Trump and cause a change in how is it that media influences public opinion and how others portray themselves. Especially if a “fact is what you believe to be so” environment takes root.
There’s no one simple explanation for Trump’s success, media or otherwise.
But every poll shows a low public opinion of the media now, new and old. The media itself typically blows that off by quoting even lower approval of Congress (politicians in general aren’t necessarily less well thought of than the media, but Congress is, so that’s what the media tends to emphasize). But we know the actual dynamic of the public’s professed distaste for Congress. They say that, then typically re-elect their own member. The outcome of the media, or individual media outlets old or now, won’t necessarily be that benign.
The news media will be here in 4 years time, maybe 14, as a pitiful attenuated group of old know-it-alls talking to each other, but not much longer.
Journalism is dying, Eygpt; and none too soon, since they are just the right wing propagandists of rich owners.