Mindless Media Pitch Trump to a Mindless Electorate by IAN TUTTLE
April 29, 2016 12:00 PM I
n Politico, Campbell Brown, a longtime correspondent and anchor with NBC and CNN, offers a lamentation for her profession: “Do we really matter,” she asks — “we” meaning television news in the year 2016 — “except as a free-media platform for a presidential candidate who almost every journalist knows could destroy the country if he ever got into the White House?”
Brown is talking, of course, about Donald Trump, and her essay is titled “Why I Blame TV for Trump.” Citing conversations with colleagues in television news, Brown suggests that “TV news has largely given Trump editorial control” because doing so sells: “It’s understood in the newsroom: Air the Trump rallies live and uninterrupted. He may say something crazy; he often does, and it’s always great television.” In the era of Trump, TV-news ratings are soaring, and executives are keen to ride this wave until it breaks. AS CBS president Les Moonves said last year, the Trump phenomenon “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
Yet as deserving of condemnation as they may be, Brown’s colleagues in television news may have a partial excuse. After all, TV executives didn’t create the ratings. Viewers did.
There is, of course, a complex relationship here: “How do voters know what they want until they see it?” &c. And Brown is right that “the coverage itself has helped create him,” and that much of the media “wants him, or needs him, to be the central character in this year’s political drama.”
But Trump is not a Manchurian candidate. He wasn’t crafted and buffed for maximal appeal. The Trump you see is the Trump you get. Television news simply provided the airtime.
And it turns out people like that Trump. Ten million people like the guy who calls women “pigs” and says he would force American soldiers to commit war crimes. More primary voters like the guy who brags about his serial adulteries and the size of his genitalia than liked courteous Mitt Romney in 2012. Forty percent of the Republican-primary electorate prefers the litigious 9/11 conspiracy theorist to the accomplished former governor of Texas, the miracle-working governor of Wisconsin, or the wunderkind senators from Texas and Florida.
The media coverage has been fawning. But that’s because the people are. There was already an appetite for Trump, and Les Moonves and Jeff Zucker (CNN) and others simply filled it.
What do you do about that?
Brown encourages more aggressive journalism, and yes, that would help. Do call Trump on his lies. But let’s not pretend that exposing Trump as inclined to self-contradiction or fabulism is the solution. That’s already happened. Trump’s flip-flops, his opportunism, his lies and damned lies — they haven’t been concealed from inquiring minds.
No, the fact is, there just aren’t inquiring minds. Ten million people have decided not to think. They have decided to ignore Trump’s countless heterodoxies, and what they suggest about Trump’s fitness for office. They have decided that they will not reflect on his manifest lack of character, and how it would affect his leadership. They have decided even to ignore his unfavorability numbers, and what they would portend in a general election. They know what they want to believe, and that’s that. Donald Trump is what happens when, en masse, voters abandon rational thought for emotional indulgence.
Certainly we have a mindless media. But who can blame them? We have a mindless electorate.
Read more at:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/434757/donald-trump-media-tv-news-campbell-brown-ratings-viewers