I had the good fortune to hear the next president-elect’s victory speech in South Carolina one night during the campaign. That was the one in which he repeated how great he was and how he would make America great again.
The speech was immense, the highlight of the Super Duper Stupor Tuesday primary events from which some of us still haven’t awoken.
While he was at it, the Next President thanked seemingly everybody in the ballroom, except Ivanka’s obstetrician, the family plastic surgeon, and the Botox lip guy with the syringe.
The one group omitted was the media, without whom none of this would have been possible.
Without us attacking him, spreading what Trump called “fake news,” he would have been just another one of the seven or seventeen dwarfs, led by Snow White (Carly) slouching their way to the highest office in the land.
Even higher praise than Pulitzers or duPont Awards should go to the cable news networks that had been covering Trump like Madonna when she was hot.
Like the alchemists of yore, one presidential candidate in 2016 discovered the secret of how to turn dross (cable news networks) into gold.
By gold, I mean the gift of $2.4 billion free airtime, according to the Washington Post (“The Most Trusted Name in Fake News”) or $2.7 billion estimated by the failing New York Times (“All the Fake News That’s Fit to Print”), which has been failing since 1857.
Here’s how that lucky candidate’s magic formula worked:
1. Say something outrageous . . . an exaggeration . . . misleading . . . totally stupid . . . utter falsehood . . . doesn’t matter. Something wild and crazy like promising to build a big beautiful wall and having Mexico pay for it.
2. Give only a first declarative sentence. Never do a second sentence with a fact that might bolster a first sentence argument’s assertion. Better yet, skip the second sentence. It tends to introduce too much detail, making a sound bite drag.
3. The third sentence then repeats the first sentence, clinching the non-argument.
The gross absurdity du jour is next discussed by the news panels of two or three assumed experts that had become the substitute for real news on cable.
Usually consisting of expert millennials, often covering their first campaign, the panel will discuss in depth the meaning of the Trumpian throwaway, chewing it over like cud for several days until the next campaign rally provides further food for thought.
A master showman and carnival barker, the candidate knows how it works. As last night’s cud starts to bore even the panelists, he drops another oratorical bombshell, and the trifecta cycle begins again.
And that candidate was, let me check my notes, the next president! Tip of our MAGA caps to him!
The fool’s gold of the alchemist king was further enriched by the cable news networks covering whole rallies. They never knew when a candidate might say something newsworthy, the thinking went. Why not perform the public service of forcing the whole meal down the audience’s throat, like the golden geese of Périgord? That courageous, innovative network would be first with the sound bite du jour, no matter how insane.
I first began noticing the enhancement on my favorite biased cable network newscast, Hardball with Chris Matthews on MSNBC. As a student of TV news journalism, I had always been impressed by Matthews’s ability to ask the longest questions in TV journalism history. He would take about five minutes phrasing a question, say, about building a wall on the Canadian border. Then add, “Your thoughts?”
The poor panelists would be looking around nervously, wondering if they would get ten or fifteen seconds to add their thoughts.
I was stunned to see one night a Trump rally in Peoria, seemingly unintentionally introduced by Matthews at the top of his seven o’clock hour, with the anchor then remaining silent for the next forty-five minutes of pure Trump (except for commercials for the latest new miracle drug with scary side effects, including death).
It gave me a chance to see the candidate do his impression of a Nuremberg speech, interrupted by chants of “Lock her up . . . Lock her up.”
The irony in all of this is that the next president would be continually using his free airtime to attack the media, “the news geniuses,” who were not being nice to him, or unfair, by not showing the folks at home just how HUGE his campaign was getting. They loved him in Alabama—20,000! They loved him in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania—17,000, whatever. They were lying to you folks at home.
And all the while he was condemning news censorship—chorus of boos whenever the hated word “media” is heard—the lying network cameras were panning the room from wall to wall.
Not all the sixteen other candidates’ rallies, it turned out, were so thoroughly covered as a public service by cable news networks.
Not only did it give one candidate all that free airtime, it sucked the oxygen out of the news environment for the other sixteen candidates. No wonder the best and brightest of Republicans with names like “Pataki,” “Perry,” “Santorum,” “Fiorina,” “Huntsman,” even “Scott Walker” were DOA.
News producers are some of the most intelligent in broadcasting, well-versed in ancient basic principles of good journalism: fairness, equal time, nonpartisan objectivity. Why didn’t they say “no way, José” to the pro-Trumpian media blitz?
What, not cover Trump 24/7? And get fired by their bosses for not being relevant? Not giving the public what it wants? All Trump/All the time! Even if they created the demand?
Is there a news director willing to be the first to say, “All this is campaign rhetoric, not news?”3
As the Kitman Law of news judgment goes, “The clown act gets the highest ratings.”
Mass nonstop distribution of candidate Trump’s wild and crazy campaign sound bites was enough for the media to be named unindicted coconspirator in the election of 2016. For the media to continue the same harmful practice of trumpeting the new president’s post-election Twitter remarks, some might say, was shameful stupidity.
What a tweet had to say could be sufficiently summarized in print on the screen without becoming the day or week’s story. Cowardly over-coverage of government by Twitter is deadly to democracy. Sad.
We of the media have been the patsies, the saps, in the Trumpification campaign.
And before I say, It’s morning in America all over again, in Ronald Reagan’s 1984 Republican slogan, there are some of us enemies of the people who say isn’t it time we woke up and smelled the horseshit?