Why the Media is Excited About Donald Trump
I initially wrote this piece before the assassination attempt on Donald Trump last weekend. It was published the morning that happened, just before it happened, but made available at the time only to paid subscribers, because I have recently adopted a gimmick whereby paid subscribers get all my articles a week before everyone else.
This piece should be read with that context in mind, but it also unwittingly links in with its theme: News moves fast. I never actually thought of what I’m doing here as news commentary until I started staggering my releases between paid and free subscribers, and now I’m keenly aware once again of the immediacy of the news cycle, and the discrepancy between views now, and views later on.
What Donald Trump represents for the news media is views now. And the media is champing at the bit for that chaos, a fact which is going to affect everything you see in the media for the next four months associated with the American election. Keep this context in mind as the reason this piece does not mention the assassination attempt and will not feature that photograph. But in some other ways it’s more relevant now than it was last weekend.
When I worked in media there was a noticeable change in the type of content that was coming down the pipeline from Editorial starting from around the point that Donald Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016.
In its heyday, Cracked sourced the vast majority of its articles from ideas pitched to a robust editorial team from the community, to be researched and written up into features by a crew of ghostwriters that included myself, but by 2016 the dismantling and disempowerment of internet media was well on its way and we were largely just writing to ideas that Editorial came up with themselves.
Those pitches were naturally based on internal stats about what kinds of articles were getting views and traffic, and during the second half of the twenty-teens that meant anything Donald Trump. I wrote and researched so much about Donald Trump over my last couple of years with the publication that my face turned tangerine. That escalated when the Russian collusion scandal started heating up.
Cody Johnston and Katie Stoll, who do the Some More News YouTube show, began that show on Cracked where it was almost entirely comedy news about the Trump administration. We had several of these types of shows running at the same time, some of them formatted as “after the game” style rundowns of the escalating insanity that was America under Trump.
Despite popular assumption it wasn’t this that tanked the site. For a while it’s what was keeping us afloat. There was a powerful market for this content. Every wacky can-you-believe-he-said-that moment. The crazy shit he tweeted. The newest twists and turns in the Russia investigation. We were treating it like a TV show because it was one. That was the point of it. That’s why he was there.d
In the Slack channel shortly after the election I remember someone from Editorial telling us that, as bad as this was for the country, it was a gift for comedy writers.
It seemed inevitable that the United States would make a game show host its president eventually. It wasn’t just a gift for comedy writers, it was a gift for media as a whole during a time when traditional media was collapsing. Between 2015 and 2020, the ratings boost to cable networks was phenomenal. That followed a long, steady decline in public engagement with the traditional media models that had been happening since the advent of the internet, and moreso with social media.
By 2015 news and other consumable media were firmly in the grasp of curated social media feeds, primarily Facebook, and Zuckerberg was well into the next phase of his project to ruin the internet for everyone. This was the year of “pivot to video” and other basic missteps in interpreting user trends that crippled written media’s ability to turn a profit or just break even.
Donald Trump’s campaign, his win, and the subsequent circus of his four years in office was like throwing gasoline on some smouldering coals—a much shorter but fiercer burn. With all of his lambasting of the media as an institution, popularizing the phrase “fake news,” as tiresome as that is now, he was paradoxically its messiah. But only for those who were willing to sell their souls to him.
The Trump campaign’s slogan should have been Make Politics Sensational Again, if only that worked as an acronym. As much as people try to analyse the President Trump phenomenon—Economic anxiety? Racist backlash?—I don’t know that enough has been said about the fact that people were just bored. There’s a cliché that came out of a G. Michael Hopf novel and a hell of a lot of social media people with Classical Roman statues in their profiles thought made a great meme, and it goes something like: “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times.”
The accuracy of that statement is dubious and I’d counter it with something like “Good times create bored people, bored people manufacture excitement and conflict.” That doesn’t look as good on an image macro. But Donald Trump didn’t come in like a wrecking ball out of nowhere, he wasn’t installed. He didn’t have an overwhelming mandate, he lost the popular vote by a very notable margin, but the phenomenon of Trump was nevertheless a response to market demand. People wanted something to watch.
Trump was in many ways the TV president. His primary focus has been on celebrity throughout his entire life. It’s like the soul of a Kardashian was accidentally born into the body of a pudgy real estate developer and he still decided to run with what he was given. Historians will view Steve Bannon as the man who created President Trump but serious and honest ones will see that Bannon shares that stage with Mark Burnett, creator of The Apprentice.
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