The Trump Presidency, Journalism, and Democracy

Robert E. Gutsche Jr., Robert E. Gutsche Jr.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351392013
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Journalismus

This book examines the disruptive nature of Trump news – both the news his administration makes and the coverage of it – related to dominant paradigms and ideologies of U.S. journalism. By relying on conceptualizations of media memory and "othering" through news coverage that enhances socio-conservative positions on issues such as immigration, the book positions this moment in a time of contestation. Contributors ranging from scholars, professionals, and media critics operate in unison to analyze today's interconnected challenges to traditional practices within media spheres posed by Trump news. The outcomes should resonate with citizens who rely on journalism for civic engagement and who are active in social change.

Chapters 6, 7 and 11 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license here: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781315142326/trump-presidency-journalism-democracy-robert-gutsche?context=ubx&refId=8cc35100-2b4d-4a73-bbff-0ab9186212de

Part I
Challenges to Journalistic Norms, Practices, and Social Cohesion

1 Donald Trump and the War on the Media

From Election ‘16 into the Trump Presidency

Douglas Kellner

From early in his improbable presidential campaign, Donald Trump has waged a war against the media. Trump’s media bashing and daily attacks via his campaign rallies, Twitter feeds, and off-the-cuff remarks have been a defining feature of both Trump’s presidential campaign and the first 200 days of his presidency. When the media criticizes his statements or actions, Trump goes on the attack. When he makes questionable or demonstrably false statements and is confronted with contrary evidence, Trump and his handlers dismiss any critical claims about Trump as “fake news” and “alternative facts.” Echoing Chairman Mao and Comrade Stalin, Trump calls the media “the enemy of the people” and rarely does a day go by without a barrage of attacks and rants against the media on his Twitter account.

Ironically, one could argue that Trump won the Republican primary contest and then the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, in part, because he is the master of media spectacle, a concept that I’ve been developing and applying to U.S. politics and media since the mid-1990s.¹ In this study, I will first discuss Trump’s use of media spectacle in his business career, in his effort to become a celebrity and reality TV superstar, and his political campaigns. I examine how Trump both uses the media in his campaign and presidency and deploys a war against the media to delegitimize criticism or opposition to his presidency. Yet Trump’s war against the media has generated a momentous battle in which segments of the media are fighting back against Trump in what has to be the most contested media spectacle in modern U.S. political history.

Donald Trump and the Politics of the Spectacle

I first came up with the concept of media spectacle to describe the key phenomenon of U.S. media and politics in the mid-1990s. This was the era of the O.J. Simpson murder case and trial, the Clinton sex scandals, and the rise of cable news networks like Fox, CNN, and MSNBC, and the 24/7 news cycle that has dominated U.S. politics and media since then.² The 1990s was also the period when the internet and new media took off so that anyone could be a political commentator, player, and participant in the spectacle, a phenomenon that accelerated as new media morphed into social media and teenagers, celebrities, politicians, and others wanting to become part of the networked virtual world joined in.

The scope of the spectacle has thus increased in the past decades with the proliferation of new media and social networking like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Skype, and the like that increases the scope and participation of the spectacle. By “media spectacles” I am referring to media constructs that present events which disrupt ordinary and habitual flows of information, and which become popular stories which capture the attention of the media and the public, and circulate through broadcasting networks, the internet, social networking, smart phones, and other new media and communication technologies. In a global networked society, media spectacles proliferate instantaneously, become virtual and viral, and in some cases become tools of sociopolitical transformation, while other media spectacles become mere moments of media hype and tabloidized sensationalism.

I’ve argued since 2008 that the key to Barack Obama’s success in two presidential elections is because he became a master of media spectacle, blending politics and performance in carefully orchestrated media spectacles. Previously, the model of the mastery of presidential spectacle was Ronald Reagan who everyday performed his presidency in a well-scripted and orchestrated daily spectacle. Reagan was trained as an actor and every night Ron and Nancy reportedly practiced his lines for the next day’s performance like they had done in their Hollywood days. Reagan breezed through the day scripted with a teleprompter and well-orchestrated media events, smiling frequently, and pausing to sound bite the line of the day.

Now in the 2016 election and into his presidency, Trump has emerged as a major form of media spectacle and has long been a celebrity and master of the spectacle with promotion of his buildings and casinos from the 1980s to the present, his reality TV shows, self-promoting events, and then his presidential campaign and election. Hence, Trump was arguably empowered and enabled to run for the presidency in part because media spectacle has become a major force in U.S. politics, helping to determine elections, government, and more broadly the ethos and nature of our culture and political sphere.

Trump’s biographies reveal that he was driven by a need to compete and win,³ and entering the highly competitive real estate business in New York in the 1980s, Trump saw the need to use the media and publicity to promote his celebrity and image. It was a time of tabloid culture and media-driven celebrity, and Trump even adopted a pseudonym “John Baron” to give the media gossip items that touted his successes in businesses, with women, and as a rising man about town (Fisher & Hobson, 2016).

Trump derives his language and behavior from a highly competitive and ruthless New York business culture and an appreciation of the importance of media and celebrity to succeed in a media-centric hypercapitalism. Hence, to discover the nature of Trump’s “temperament,” personality, and use of language, we should recall his reality TV show The Apprentice and his book The Art of the Deal (Trump & Schwartz, 1987),⁴ which popularized him into a supercelebrity and made The Donald a major public figure for a national audience. Indeed, Trump is the first reality TV candidate who runs his campaign like a reality TV series, boasting during the most chaotic episodes in his campaign that his rallies are the most entertaining and sending outrageous tweets into the Twitter-sphere which then dominate the news cycle on the ever-proliferating mainstream media and social networking sites. Hence, Trump is the first celebrity candidate whose use of the media and celebrity star power is his most potent weapon in his improbable and highly surreal campaign.⁵

The Apprentice, Twitter, and the Summer of Trump

Since Trump’s national celebrity derived in part from his role in the reality TV series The Apprentice, we need to interrogate this popular TV phenomenon to help explain the Trump phenomenon. The opening theme music “For the Love of Money,” a 1973 R&B song by The O’Jays, established the capitalist ethos of the competition for the winning contestant to get a job with the Trump organization; obviously, money is the key to Trump’s business and celebrity success, although there is much controversy over how rich Trump is. As of this writing, he has not released his tax returns to quell rumors that he isn’t as rich as he claims, that he does not contribute as much to charity as he has stated, and that in many years he had paid little or no taxes.

In the original format to The Apprentice, several contestants formed teams to carry out a task dictated by Trump, and each “contest” resulted with a winner and Trump barking, “You’re fired” to the loser. Curiously, some commentators believe in the 2012 presidential election that Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney handily because he early on characterized Romney as a billionaire who liked to fire people. This is ironic since firing people is Trump’s signature personality trait in his business, reality TV, and now political career, which saw him fire two campaign managers and more advisors by August 2016, and made dramatic firings of key officials a defining feature of his chaotic administration.

The Apprentice’s TV Producer Mark Burnett broke into national consciousness with his reality TV show The Survivor, a neo-Darwinian epic of alliances, backstabbing, and nastiness, which provides an allegory of how one succeeds in the dog-eat-dog business world in which Trump has thrived – and spectacularly failed, as many of the books about him document. Both Burnett and Trump share the neo-Darwinian (a)social ethos of nineteenth-century ultracompetitive capitalism with some of Trump’s famous witticisms proclaiming:

When somebody challenges you unfairly, fight back – be brutal, be tough – don’t take it. It is always important to WIN!

I think everyone’s a threat to me.

Everyone that’s hit me so far has gone down. They’ve gone down big league.

I want my generals kicking ass.

I would bomb the shit out of them.

You bomb the hell out of the oil. Don’t worry about the cities. The cities are terrible.

(Trump in Pogash, 2016, pp. 30, 152, 153)

In any case, The Apprentice made Trump a national celebrity who became well-known enough to plausibly run for president. Throughout the campaign, Trump used his celebrity to gain media time. In addition to his campaign’s ability to manipulate broadcast media, Trump has also been a heavy user of Twitter and tweets out his messages throughout the day and night. Indeed, Trump may be the first major Twitter candidate, and certainly, he is the one using it most aggressively and frequently into his presidency. Twitter was launched in 2006, but I don’t recall it being used in a major way in the 2008 election, although Obama used Facebook and his campaign bragged that he had over a million “Friends” and used Facebook as part of his daily campaign apparatus. I don’t recall, however, other presidential candidates using Twitter in a big way like Trump, although many have Twitter accounts.

Twitter is a perfect vehicle for Trump as you can use its 140-character framework for attacking, bragging, and getting out simple messages or posts that engage receivers who feel they are in the know and involved in TrumpWorld when they get pinged and receive his tweets. When asked at an August 26, 2015, Iowa event as to why he uses Twitter so much, Trump replied that it was easy, it only took a couple of seconds, and that he could attack his media critics when he “wasn’t treated fairly.” Trump has also used Instagram – an online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing, and social networking service that enables its users to take pictures and videos, and share them on a variety of social networking platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Flickr.

Twitter is perfect for General Trump who can blast out his opinions and order his followers what to think. It enables Businessman and Politician Trump to define his brand and to mobilize those who wish to consume or support it. “Trump Twitter” gratifies the need of Narcissist Trump to be noticed and recognized as a Master of Communication who can bind his warriors into an online community. Twitter enables the Pundit in Chief to opine, rant, attack, and proclaim on all and sundry subjects, and to subject TrumpWorld to the indoctrination of their Fearless Leader.

Hence, Trump has mastered social media as well as perfecting the domination of television and old media through his orchestration of media events as spectacles and his daily Twitter feed. In Trump’s presidential campaign kickoff speech on June 16, 2015, when he announced he was running for president, Trump and his wife, Melania, dramatically ascended down the stairway at Trump Tower. Trump strode up to a gaggle of microphones and henceforth dominated media attention for days with his dramatic pronouncements and the controversy they provoked. The opening speech of his campaign made typically inflammatory remarks that held in thrall news cycles:

The United States has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.

[Applause]

Thank you. It’s true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

These comments ignited a firestorm of controversy and a preview of things to come concerning vile racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and the other hallmarks of Trump’s Cacophony of Hate. Debate over Trump’s assault on undocumented immigrants would come to dominate daily news cycles of the Republican primaries and would continue to play out in the general election in fall 2016. In the lead-up to the first Republican primary debate in fall 2015, Trump received the majority of media time, and his daily campaign appearances and the Republican primary debates became media spectacle dominated by Trump.

Every day that Trump had a campaign event, the cable news networks would hype the event with crawlers on the bottom of the TV screen proclaiming, “Waiting for Trump,” with airtime on cable TV dominated by speculation on what he would talk about. Trump’s speeches were usually broadcast live, often in their entirety, a boon of free TV time that no candidate of either party was awarded. After the Trump event, the rest of the day the pundits would dissect what he had said and his standing – vis-à-vis the other Republican candidates. If Trump had no campaign event planned, he would fire off a round of tweets against his opponents on his highly active Twitter account, which then would be featured on network cable news discussions as well as social media.

Hence, Trump’s orchestration of media spectacle and a compliant ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Translating Trump: How to Discuss the Complications of Covering New Presidential Politics
• Part I Challenges to Journalistic Norms, Practices, and Social Cohesion
• Part II Journalism during Difficult Discourse
• Part III Trump, Rhetoric, and Understanding Amid Media Fragmentation
• Part IV Journalistic Recovery Post-Trump: Lessons Learned
• Epilogue: Facing Tomorrow in an Age of Trump
• List of Contributors
• Index