Posted on 09/22/2015 6:52:41 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
s the press guilty of inflating Donald Trump’s political fortunes? Or, from the beginning, did the press seek to undermine his candidacy? The answer to both questions is “yes.” As our friends in academia like to remind us, voters don’t wake from a deep sleep one morning and tell pollsters that they’ve decided that a novice politician like Trump should be the next president. Voters rely on the press to keep tabs on the entry of new candidates into races, and the press obliged them in its coverage of Trump.
Boy, did they oblige them. The fullness of the media’s fascination with the Trump candidacy can be found in every metric—tallies of newspaper stories, minutes of coverage on the big three networks’ evening newscasts, Facebook and Twitter mentions, news items and features airing on cable, and Google News hits. The cable networks ran hours of his many speeches and rallies, with only minimal commentary. I’ve played my own tiny role in the Trump boom, writing six columns about the man since the end of July, and more are likely to follow.
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. So, yes, the press helped “create” the surge that has carried Trump to his current status as the Republican Party’s front-runner. It covered Trump as it had every responsibility to do. It noticed that its coverage of Trump was getting noticed, so it covered him some more, and a natural feedback loop formed to build on itself. But the coverage of Trump and the interest in his candidacy didn’t emerge from a void. Trump stood at 4 percent in the polls before he announced and before coverage of him swelled: His place in the polls exceeded that of more venerable politicians and eventual presidential candidates Rick Santorum, John Kasich, Bobby Jindal, Lindsey Graham and Rick Perry.
The Trump coverage explosion was lit by a second fuse. The press has been covering the mogul for four decades, scribbling away as he has courted controversy, filed lawsuits, bought and sold properties and companies, launched new ventures and said provocative things. He’s always been great copy, and as a self-publicist he has consistently made himself available to the press. This has caused reporters’ notebooks, newsroom morgues, video archives and library bookshelves to overflow with documentary material about him that was easily repurposed in a new, political context. Even if Trump hadn’t caught fire in the early presidential polls after announcing his candidacy, he would have received disproportionate coverage because (1) of the enormousness of his paper trail and (2) all the juicy details inscribed on those pages.
But “blaming” the press for the Trump surge neglects the salient fact that so much of the coverage of him has been darkly negative. According to the old journalistic cliché, reporters love to build up candidates so they can tear them down. In Trump’s case, the press didn’t build him up first, they went directly to demolition, examining the dirt from his past—his divorces, his wild exaggerations, his bad business deals, his lobbying, his feuds, his college years, his high-school years, his wobbly grasp on public policy, his history as a birther and the rip-off that is Trump University. Trump’s flip-flops make him an unreliable candidate, the press said. He cheats at golf. He possesses the limited vocabulary of a child, has bad taste, and has said some of the dumbest and most outrageous things. When, long before he rose to the top of the polls, he insulted John McCain, the press tore into him with renewed velocity. His vile generalization about Mexicans and his ugly comments about Megyn Kelly and Carly Fiorina earned him more of the same. I’m sure flattering pieces have been published about him in the past three months, I just can’t find many of them.
Much of the Trump coverage has devoted itself to predicting his early political demise—not exactly the kind of press clips a candidate covets. In June, when Trump announced, the consensus press view was that he had no chance to win. As his campaigned geared up in July and he climbed in polls, the press and the commentariat declared that peak Trump. (See Washington Post National Journal, NBC News [“Donald Trump Has Nowhere to Go But Down”] and POLITICO). But that turned out to be a false peak, as Trump continued to rise in August. This prompted additional stories about him peaking (see the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, Washington Examiner and Mother Jones). Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol grew so certain Trump’s end was near that he signed the candidate’s death certificate on Twitter 10 times between July 20 and August 14.
Somehow Trump’s rise in the polls persisted, taking him higher and then higher still, clearing 30 percent in the Real Clear Politics average before the CNN debate. He lost that debate in a pitiable performance, said CNN, Weekly Standard, Vox, Real Clear Politics, Bloomberg Politics, the Daily Beast and others. The press promptly rearmed for another round of “peaked” stories. My POLITICO colleague Ben Schreckinger filed a piece analyzing the decline in Trump mentions on social media, TV, and radio, and his drop in the prediction markets to show Trump fever was finally breaking. In the New Yorker, Ryan Lizza wrote that a lack of a “second act” to Trump’s campaign would spell his doom. “The beginning of the end of Donald Trump?” asked the headline in a new piece by the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank. “Trump’s Last Stand?” echoed the Atlantic headline. “The Beginning of Trump’s End?” the Slate headline agreed.
Over the weekend, Trump dropped several points in the CNN poll. That looked like additional confirmation of the candidate’s fall—except that Trump’s numbers dropped in the Real Clear Politics average after the Fox News Channel debate in August. If Trump were to claw his way back in a week or two, who could be surprised?
It’s supposed to be a sin for journalists to give the people what they want. But that’s not the story of the Trump coverage. Trump wasn’t a “media creation,” as New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow just put it. His wind was blowing hot on the zeitgeist ages before he declared his candidacy. The Republican electorate is clearly in an angry and anti-establishment mood this year. Trump filled that hole. He had created himself (with a little help from his daddy, of course) and has poured himself into non-real estate vessels—television, beauty pageants, gambling, golf courses, licensing—with varying degrees of success. I wouldn’t go so far as to say has deserved the volume of coverage that has come his way, as there is no golden yardstick by which we can make that measurement. But as news coverage generally follows reader and viewer interest, you could argue, as FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver did in late July after consulting the data, that public interest in Trump exceeded that of the news media.
“So if the press were going purely by public demand, there might be even more Trump coverage,” Silver wrote.
Maybe we should all thank our lucky stars.
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I write about Trump only when a request is filed in triplicate by my editors. Send your story requests via email to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. My email alerts, my Twitter feed, RSS feed debate have never been more popular.
Trump has been leading in the polls because he is leading with policies.
trump
The lib media shot themselves in the foot.
The media just won’t admit that they are ‘the establishment’ that everyone is disgusted with.
Trump is in part a media creation.
The GOP establishment and the media have made a concerted effort to stop Trump. That effort is proof of Trump’s main points and has strengthened him tremendously. The free publicity he gets for saying things that offend political correctness has allowed him to maintain a huge presence in our daily conversation for not much more money than Walker spent in his unsuccessful campaign.
Similarly, the orchestrated attacks on Trump, with even GOP debate questions centering on Trump over policy, has been a gift to Trump and his supporters. By centering their questions on Trump and calling him out for offending those whose policies offend voters, the media have made him a hero to patriotic Americans. By stacking the debate audiences with establishment shills, the GOP has reinforced our contempt for their business as usual governance and increased the demand for an outsider like Trump (or Carson or Carly).
They thought they would build him up and then knock him down. In the meantime, America heard what he was actually saying. Now knocking him down is not going so well.
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