The victory of Donald Trump has been highlighted in most images as that of a shock victory by a billionaire who based his campaign on divisive and racial appeal, defying the polls on a populist upsurge. It was a narrow victory and Clinton was defeated by small shifts in some of the key battleground states.
Trump’s campaign was always more entertainment than about policies. Like any good entertainer he always tried to keep the audience amused and engaged. He refused to bore the audience with serious policy details and instead maintained a high tempo of provocative statements in his campaigns. All his opponents were liars or crooked, the media was crooked and anything/anybody who went against Trump was invariably horrible and a liar. His whole campaign was inflammatory against Mexicans, Muslims, China, women and the media and he refused to apologize.
For the media he provided headlines daily right from the time he entered as one of the Republican candidates and channels like CNN and the three major networks that continuously highlighted his campaigns live.
The networks were rewarded for their devotion to Trump with massive audiences — and an unexpected windfall from advertisers. Traffic online soared as well, tempting even established news organizations that often did break big stories about the candidates, such as The Washington Post to turn their sites into smorgasbords of Trump news. Television programmers found that Trump's appeal was the uncertainty of what he would say or do next. It's the same magic formula of big reality shows and sporting events, where the outcome is not foreordained. As Trump granted fewer interviews through the summer, CNN simply loaded up with paid surrogates for both sides, embracing debate in a way that made the Crossfire combatants of an earlier era seem timid. The strategy succeeded commercially but failed as journalism.[1]
In the process, critical analysis of Trump like the daily changes on his policy statements, the non- declaration of his Income tax details, the various dubious activities of his companies/trusts were not covered by most of the media. In terms of media attention his campaign was a success. According to the Financial Times he received $4.6 billion worth of free TV exposure.[2]
On the other hand, although the newspaper editorials all officially supported Hilary Clinton, they continued to give a lot of negative coverage on relatively minor issues like her email leakages and the exposure of the Democratic Party emails. There was a time when the three major U.S networks and papers like New York Times and Washington Post played a fair and balanced approach during elections. This time however with the advent of social media and with a large number of alternate media sources available on the internet, the once powerful media organizations seemed clueless and did not do adequate justice to stories that would have sunk any other candidate. Trump continuously made statements which were false with morally and factually indefensible positions and along the line the media just did not follow up with any integrity or authority. There were a few attempts in the last few weeks to expose Trump’s Russia connections and the dubious activities of his organizations, but met with the relentless attack by Trump, they turned out to be half-hearted.
To most of us Indians, this is all sadly familiar. Indian politics has always been about promises and dreams with little discussed about policies. Indian mainstream media also finds this an occasion to take a high moral ground pointing out how politicians are continuously campaigning on caste/religious grounds playing all kinds of divisive games and how voters are also bribed with items/cash in many parts of the country. Indian elections are referred to as a “tamasha” with the media faithfully reporting campaign rhetoric which generally relies on nasty slogans about the opponents. Issues like morality, education and character are generally not covered by the media except in some pontifical editorials and it is all about money and mudslinging. For the smaller media outlets, politics has ceased to be a contest of ideas and are instead a very profitable occasion where they can show films stars, criminals and petty politicians vying with each other with colourful solutions for all of our poverty and corruption.
In hindsight, the media in the U.S. should have been fair to their role. The mainstream media should not have covered the inflammatory statements that Trump continued to make and that got him a huge amount of free headline coverage. It no doubt made for great viewing and gathered a large viewership and thus advertisers, but this was the wrong thing to do. The more Trump realized that mudslinging and inflammatory statements on his opponents and on other issues made for high viewership and attention, the more provocative he got and probably gathered more free coverage for himself than all the other candidates. Trump showed a total disregard for facts, truth, and legitimate expertise and spent a large share of his presidential campaign not just attacking democratic norms but also attacking the experts who have come to symbolize democracy in the United States. Like Huffington Post, they should not have treated this as serious politics but rather as entertainment and refrained from giving Trump the blanket coverage he received.
Relentless in their investigation of his affairs
Trump was strictly speaking, a slightly shady billionaire with a ruthless and uncaring reputation. According to later news coverage, his companies and his charitable organization were always close to the edge where ethics and laws were concerned. He took advantage of all possible tax loopholes. He refused to disclose his tax returns which every Presidential candidate has done for many years. The media should therefore have been relentless in investigating Trump and his organizations.
Focus on substance of policies that he mentioned
With the media enthralled in covering Trump and his incendiary statements, the media totally ignored or gave very poor coverage to Trump’s beliefs on education, climate change, science, health and other major policy issues. Most of these were retrograde but they were not critically analysed by major media organizations.
False equivalence
The media also endulged in false equivalence, where Hilary Clinton’s minor defects like the email issues were weighed and treated as equal to the major defects of Trump and were thus given huge coverage disproportionate to what they deserved. There were days in a row in the last stages of the campaign, when the media covered Hillary’s emails as headline news and as major misdemeanours when they probably really did not even deserved to be covered in the first place as there was nothing news worthy in that subject. But the major media coverage given to this made a number of people uneasy about Hillary and probably played in role in their abstention or voting for Trump.
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