This topic suggested itself to me while I was reading this WaPo article:
The thing about them all being women wasn’t the part that caught my eye. It was this paragraph:
…
The media are hard on those in power, full stop. And they care about one thing — the story, which these days also translates into being bookable. Trump was a loaves-and-fishes story who kept growing the media’s audience, ratings and advertising. Without him, one wonders what becomes of those big-budget payrolls. Biden will be more challenging because — let’s be honest — he’ll be boring, which is good for the country but not necessarily good for the bookers, scribes and narrators.
Earlier the article said that whether you loved him or hated him, The Donald generated news (or what passed for news) 24/7. No one had to go looking for stories. It poured in the door and flooded the virtual City Desk. Media coverage for the last five years (I’m including the campaign) has consisted of reacting to the steady stream of react-to-able stuff spewed forth by Donnie. He has been the hub of the media coverage wheel, and stars were born because of the always-present, impossible-to-ignore invitation to comment on, investigate, comment on the investigations into, praise, criticize, stomp, and/or glorify The Donald Dumpster Fire-- but never to turn away from it.
The flywheel will keep spinning for a while, but surely entropy and resistance will slow the mechanism down (please God! ). Can any media outlet settle for and get used to the old-fashioned “press conference” when we’ve been treated (ahem) to the tapping of the president’s thumbs as he sits on the don john every morning? What’s going to happen to FOX, its stars, and its viewers? What the hell are they going to report on? Can the media start acting normal again? This enquiring mind wants to know.
Really? I wonder… It’s like a tank full of sharks saying, “Oh thank goodness we’re getting canned food again. We were getting tired of eating live chickens and puppies.”
Today, President Biden released his initial budget proposal for 2021. Former President Trump responded with a tweet: “OMG Sleepy Joe’s budget as reported by the FAKE NEWS MEDIA contains nothing for investigating the RIGGED ELECTION. The SENATE must immediately reject this INVALID proposal!!!”
For more on Trump’s response, we turn to Trump spokesman Jason Miller…
I know we’ll never go back to the days of Walter “The Most Trusted Man in America” Cronkite, but will any of the media outlets (mainstream or other) be able to UNDO it? In four years… before Donnie or his clone retake the presidency?
It might help if Donald Trump dies, to be honest. I’m not wishing his death; I’m just saying his death would really calm things down for the next four years.
We need a word for this. I think an obvious choice might be “reactable”. But several articles I’ve seen discussing the side-effects of the Covid-19 vaccine are using the word “reactogenic”. Apparently that’s a real word in those circles.
Fox will rediscover its hatred for “executive overreach” and treat every executive order as unconstitutional.
Fox and mainstream news will all start worrying about the deficit and debt again.
Mainstream news will again follow up on the smallest possible indiscretions (something like Trump shilling for Goya will be in the news for weeks) since there won’t be a firehose of lies, corruption, and bullshit coming from the oval office anymore. They will all keep the outrage coming, even if they have to spend multiple years on someone’s personal use of email or something.
Interesting article from yesterday, somewhat relevant to this thread:
I tend to think that business people are keeping a finger in the wind. When the prevailing wind direction changes, they pivot. It’s more about economics than true principle, but …
Honestly, I think the changes (if any) will vary based on the platform. Mainstream is going to to see that the ‘politics’ section is not going to be grabbing the headlines daily, so we’ll see a lot more special interest, scandal, and the like crawling back to their places of strange prominence.
Fox is arguably on the Trump’s hate-list, so they’ll go to pre 2016 norms, where they focus on what were once the ‘mainstream’ republican talking points, of limited government, debt, military spending and the like, but they will likely continue to steadily loose share (although will likely still be dominant) especially if ONN and the like snap up some of their talking heads of the Trumpiest sort.
ONN will probably continue to grow even more partisan, and if they’re smart they’ll headhunt some of the people Fox will have to be careful juggling after a pivot to the new normal, with a wildcard of if/when Trump makes them his go-to call-in going forward. Alternately, if Trump buys into ONN or creates his own, that’s where the watchers will be.
Twitter will probably be pretty much the same, as people don’t seem set on changing their ways, but I bet that they won’t censor or censure Trump even as a private individual to the degree their terms and conditions would require. He’ll generate tweets and retweets, and they want them that attention. And Parler just isn’t up to it, even if Trump was willing to move entirely to that platform.
The biggest unknown is Trump of course. Will he start his own network? Will ONN bring him on as a highly paid commentator? Short of death, stroke or the like, he’s still going to be the the one generating the most news for the next few years, as his followers will wait on his every comment, especially as he pivots from the “I still won they cheated” to the “Despite their cheats, I’m still strong, and we’ll be back in 2024” messages. With constant attacks on political norms and personal attacks on anyone who ‘wrongs’ him.
Lastly, even Mainstream media is going to have plenty, plenty of scandals of Trump and his responses, we’re going to be seeing lots of lawsuits against Trump and his family action on the state level as a minimum, plus the likely constitutional drama of a multiplicity of bad-faith, self serving pardons to self, staff and family.
So TL;DR - nothing will change, just that the focus will be on the ex-president, rather than the current president.
There will still be Trump-related news to be had for the next 4 years. It will overshadow real government-related news. Or, it will be about Trump or Trumpists screaming about real government stuff.
Trump and his 70 million fans aren’t going to vaporize on Jan 21st.
When Bill Clinton took office in 1992, Rush Limbaugh started every episode of both his radio and tv shows with “America Held Hostage: Day (Number of days in Clinton’s term)” declaring Clinton’s administration as dictatorial and illegal with very little evidence for years.
I expect that it will be much worse with most of the right wing outlets.
I remember that a few years back there was a thread where recommendations for fair right wing outlets were requested, after looking at a list that I had made years earlier I checked on them again and more recently they are becoming extremely unhinged, Just about now the American Conservative remains in my list, others like The American Spectator has several articles now reporting as fact conspiracy theories that there was extensive fraud in the past election while The American Conservative has mostly articles criticizing the choices of the new administration.
I actually appreciated his paragraph that followed that statement – if only a bit – though:
“The tens of millions of people who vote Republican are not deplorable. They are misled,” he wrote. “And the mocking and tribalistic coverage that lefty media often engage in only makes things worse.”
I don’t know about you, but the Trump supporters in my life … in my family … in my ecosystem are naïve and easily led. They’ve fallen prey to textbook and stereotypical demagoguery.
But they really aren’t the ‘deplorables.’
If we want to dramatically oversimplify support for DJT – as I’ve said here before – you can say it’s:
those who voted for him because of his execrable human qualities, and
those who voted for him in spite of those qualities.
The latter group are the ones who could possibly be reached.
So, tens of millions of people who vote GOP are misled, presumably by right wing media.
But left wing media gives them only “mocking and tribalistic coverage,” and the (presumably) centrist mainstream media “doesn’t write empathetically enough” about them.
I guess we need a splunge media for those tens of millions of gullible snowflakes.
). Can any media outlet settle for and get used to the old-fashioned “press conference” when we’ve been treated (ahem) to the tapping of the president’s thumbs as he sits on the 
