Way back in 2016 TV network chiefs knew the destruction they were wreaking with their 24/7 razzle-dazzle Trump coverage. “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” said the network’s chairman Les Moonves. “The money’s rolling in and this is fun . . .Bring it on, Donald.”
Now we know that Trump was gifted around $2 billion in free media plus substantially more coverage than his opponents.
Fast forward to 2021, a few months after president Joe Biden was sworn in. US journalist and author Julie Ioffe asked some reporters how life had been since the Trump circus left town.
“Trump has been good for many journalists professionally, myself included,” said one.
“I mean, it wasn’t just the fact that Trump was a gravy train,” said another. “It’s also juxtaposed (against) the most boring administration in modern history. You go from a circus with flaming chainsaws to… what? An old man watching his dog?”
That “old man” was just a year older than Trump is now.
Since then the old man’s economy has added a record number of jobs and sees stocks – a Trump fixation during his presidency – at a record high.
Trump, meanwhile, is facing 91 criminal indictments, some relating to attempts to overthrow the government. In October alone he said that shoplifters should be shot and suggested an army general should be executed for treason. He promises a mass deportation programme with internment camps near the border, and plans to use the military to crush street protests via the Insurrection Act, while being a dictator on day one. At a global level he is happy to throw small sovereign countries like Estonia under Putin’s tanks.
Yet this man, with all the mental acuity of a howling dog, is ahead in the polls. The flaming chainsaw circus act is back with a vengeance, and for some in the media so is that sweet gravy train.
Might the two be linked?
The ceaseless drumbeat about Biden’s age and decline – reminiscent of the saturation 2016 coverage of Hillary Clinton’s emails – is once again enabling the candidate with openly violent dictatorship ambitions to campaign as a normal politician, as if this was the Kentucky Derby.
In a speech to the National Rifle Association last Friday, Trump lied dozens of times, slurred his words and confused basic facts, according to a furious Biden campaign adviser. “But you won’t hear about any of it if you watch cable news, read this weekend’s papers, or watch the Sunday shows,” raged TJ Ducklo, accusing beltway reporters of being numb to Trump’s horrifying candidacy. Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?
Yet in the weekend’s New York Times Biden’s age and memory were addressed negatively by no fewer than three prominent columnists plus the paper’s editorial board, along with multiple news stories. On a Sunday current affairs show a CNN chyron asked, “Is Biden’s age now a bigger problem than Trump’s indictments?” It was the classic circular question which could have begun with the media itself asking about its own role in the growing “problem”.
An outlier was a Washington Post feature describing Biden’s work schedule around the special counsel interviews he sat down for on the two days following the appalling October 7th Hamas atrocity. He was brain-shifting between calls with world leaders about a threatened Middle East conflagration and 2½-hour sessions of questions about decades-old events.
Given that Biden was exonerated on several counts while others were deemed no longer sensitive or not provable, the special counsel’s scathing commentary on his memory was remarkable in terms of timing.
Trump was back again in a federal courthouse in a criminal case involving classified documents and obstruction of FBI efforts. “I’m in court. Again!” boasted his campaign message.
Still, the growing consensus is that Biden is the one with the problem and must bow out.
There are reasons why this is barely feasible, a big one being that the deadline for candidates’ primary ballot submissions, involving a hefty fee and many thousands of voter signatures, has already passed in most states. If, having won enough delegates to be unsurpassable, Biden then withdraws, the nomination could be decided on the floor of the Democratic National Convention in August, where delegates could choose a saviour candidate instead. Not many ambitious big names, timing their run, want to pit themselves against a sitting president. Plus Biden has the funds and has already proven himself against Trump.
So the more pressing question is how a responsible media weighs up the declining memory of a mostly successful pro-democracy incumbent versus the threat of a vile, vengeful, authoritarian alternative.
Most people have no idea how dangerously deranged an unfiltered Trump looks on his own platform. So there is a balance to be struck: how to cover Trump as a candidate while printing the unvarnished truth of what he actually says. What most people see instead is the text-heavy, sanitised, balanced – as opposed to objective – headlines of the mainstream media and/or the polarised call-and-response of a social media that rewards hate and ignorance.
Maybe the mainstream solution involves in-your-face tactics such as replacing the big front page images several times a day with unfiltered Trump social statements in a size and font readable at 50m.
This is not just a problem for US media. The social media commentary around immigration has similar resonances in this country. No headline or episodic news feature can convey the reality of that ceaseless, hate-filled, truth-distorting drumbeat. But we have to try.