Monday, October 10, 2016

NEW YORK TIMES MEDIA CRITIC: THE RISE OF DONALD TRUMP HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH RIGHT-WING POLITICS

Here's Jim Rutenberg, the man picked to replace David Carr as media critic of The New York Times, with the laziest take imaginable on the subject of Donald Trump:
Above all else, the success of Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign was made possible by the media environment in which it was spawned, and his canny ability to exploit it....

A forceful personality with an unparalleled reality-television pedigree, Mr. Trump was perfectly primed to take advantage of the increasingly happy marriage between the news and entertainment sides of the media business -- becoming a textbook candidate for the modern infotainment era of which he was already a product....

Mr. Trump came at [the campaign] with a new philosophy: Give them a big, messy show with a regular stream of action, and they will come with their cameras and won’t turn them off....

He reached the highest level of electoral politics not through legislative or executive accomplishment but through a series of video moments that showcased a can’t-look-away personality as much as anything he achieved in business.
And ... that's it. That's the syllogism: Trump mastered televised entertainment, politics is now televised entertainment, therefore Trump beat 16 candidates to become the Republican presidential nominee, and seemed for a while to be on the verge of being elected president. Television is the drug of the nation! So fame is all it took!

Except that that makes no sense. Yes, we love our video entertainment, but who else has made the leap from reality TV to politics, apart from that guy who was on The Real World back in the early 2000s and is now a congressman whose name you've probably never heard of? There's no glide path from reality TV to politics. Clay Aiken lost his congressional race in 2014. Jerry Springer assessed his prospects and chose not to run for a Senate seat in 2004 (and he'd actually been mayor of Cincinnati prior to his TV career). Politics isn't reality TV. Americans like reality TV. They don't particularly like politics.

Rutenberg adds:
... as we know now, nothing did more to set up Mr. Trump for 2016 presidential politics than his own TV show, “The Apprentice,” which became a hit during its first season, in 2004....

He had no policy expertise and was not a historian, but he offered something more compelling for news producers: ratings, which is the only thing that can explain all the coverage he later received for his news conferences questioning President Obama’s citizenship.
It's as if there's nothing more to the formula than fame -- it's as if tapping into the racism of the GOP electorate had nothing to do with Trump's success. When he led the GOP primary polls for a brief period in 2011 before choosing not to run, it was high name recognition, yes, but it was also birtherism. When he hijacked the primaries in this cycle, it was Mexican- and Muslim-bashing. The Apprentice set him up for this, but hate finished the job.

7 comments:

Victor said...

Whaaaaaaaaaaah!

THE!!

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!


If YOU'RE ME JACKIN-ME OFF, STEVE, I'VE HAD BETTER!!!!!
JUST NOT FROM A GUY,

Sadly, I just checked. ..
You ain't.....?........

Danp said...

I don't think Rutenberg is saying what you think he is. I interpret it as Trump sees a path to winning as a game player finds a winning strategy. In this case, it's about finding a large audience you can play. That would be Republicans. Conspiracy theories, endless conflict, cartoon enemies, score keepers (polls and primaries), reffing the refs - these are Republican game strategies, and Trump thinks he's a master of the game. Issues don't really matter much. If Dems used these strategies, Trump would happily trade his wall for a magic windmill that replaces carbon fuels. The real parallel is between the Republican voter and the mindless TV viewer who gladly suspends disbelief and becomes emotionally drawn to a contestant based on personality.

Victor said...

Wrong, I mean.....

Feud Turgidson said...

Simply amazing how Bezos, off one hire of a new editor, has seen his newspaper leapfrog over the Times as the unarguably best newspaper in the country.

And it is like the Punch or Pinch or whatever TF that idiot's name is didn't know who Marty Baron was - the guy who spent over a decade running their No. 2 publication in one of the top media markets in the country. As the late Terry-Thomas would say, "What a shower!"

Jim Snyder said...

@Feud: back in the day, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I lived for my daily fix of Nova Prada. And I fsckin' despised Pravda on the Potomac.

Imagine how I feel being forced to admit that Pravda on the Potomac has Nova Pravda beat hands down. [sobs]

Srsly, I'm thinking of taking out a subscription to Pravda on the Potomac just to show my appreciation that someone in this country is doin' journalism.

Jimbo said...

Sure the MSM has prostituted itself to Trump for the ratings and he's played them well but the link to the aroused Republican rabble goes back at least 20 years to the creation of Fox News and the emergence of the Internet. (Right-wing propaganda is much older than that, of course, but didn't have those two huge epistemic closure megaphones available to it.) Trump took advantage of the rage machine and even brought on Bannon of Breitbart to solidify the relationship.
FWIW, I don't think Trump would have worked the Dem side mainly because they would never have wanted him as any kind of standard bearer and because he really does believe some loathsome things that are just fine with the GOP base but not the Democratic base.

KenRight said...

I really don't believe Muslim-bashing is the real concern of the Elite about Trump. The real concern is in caps.

http://www.newsweek.com/vladimir-putin-sidney-blumenthal-hillary-clinton-donald-trump-benghazi-sputnik-508635

Dear Mr. Trump, I am not Sidney Blumenthal
www.newsweek.com
The Republican nominee for president pushed Russian propaganda about Benghazi to American voters.
"For now, though, Americans should be outraged. This totalitarian regime, engaged in what are arguably war crimes in Syria to protect its government puppet, is working to upend a democracy to the benefit of an American candidate who uttered positive comments just Sunday about the Kremlin's campaign on behalf of Bashar al-Assad. Trump’s arguments were an incomprehensible explication of the complex Syrian situation, which put him right on the side of the Iranians and Syrians, who are fighting to preserve the government that is the primary conduit of weapons used against ISRAEL."