Trump and the Media

Edited by Pablo J. Boczkowski and Zizi Papacharissi

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

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ISBN: 978-0-262-03796-9

eISBN: 9780262346603

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Table of Contents

Title page

Copyright page

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction

I Journalism in Question

2 Why Journalism in the Age of Trump Shouldn’t Surprise Us

3 Alternative Facts: Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New U.S. Media Regime

4 Trump and the Great Disruption in Public Communication

5 Empirical Failures: Data Journalism, Cultural Identity, and the Trump Campaign

6 My Very Own Alternative Facts about Journalism

7 Who’s Playing Who? Media Manipulation in an Era of Trump

8 Lessons from the Paparazzi: Rethinking Photojournalistic Coverage of Trump

II Emotion, Populism, and Media Events

9 The Importance of Being a Headline

10 Public Displays of Disaffection: The Emotional Politics of Donald Trump

11 Facts (Almost) Never Win Over Myths

12 The Media Are about Identity, Not Information

13 Anticipating News: What Trump Teaches Us about How the Networked Press Can and Should Imagine

14 Media Projections and Trump’s Election: A Self-Defeating Prophecy?

15 Creeping Toward Authoritarianism?

III Why Technology Matters

16 The Potential of Networked Solidarity: Communication at the End of the Long Twentieth Century

17 Breaking the Rules of Political Communication: Trump’s Successes and Miscalculations

18 Trump on Twitter: How a Medium Designed for Democracy Became an Authoritarian’s Mouthpiece

19 Tweeting All the Way to the White House

20 Social Media or Social Inequality: Trump’s Unexpected Election

21 How Interactivity Can Build Transparency: What Tech Can Teach Us about Rebuilding Media Trust

IV Pathways Ahead

22 The Center of the Universe No More: From the Self-Centered Stance of the Past to the Relational Mindset of the Future

23 Trump, Journalists, and Social Networks of Trust

24 When Commercialism Trumps Democracy: Media Pathologies and the Rise of the Misinformation Society

25 Making Journalism Great Again: Trump and the New Rise of News Activism

26 The Case for Campaign Journalism

27 We All Stand Together or We All Fall Apart: On the Need for an Adversarial Press in the Age of Trump

Contributors

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

It always takes a village. But sometimes more than others. This was one of those times. This book took six months from conception to final delivery of the manuscript, which is quite a feat for scholarly publishing. This would not have happened if it were not for the support and contributions of a large number of people.

We are extremely grateful to our editor at the MIT Press, Gita Manaktala. Her unfailing commitment to this project from the very first email exchange, her insightful advice at every step of the way, and her always warm presence have made our collaboration not only possible but also a true pleasure.

Our authors were a blessing to work with. They trusted us to shepherd a project that was unique not only because of its fast production cycle but also for the unusual genre format we asked them to work with—a 2,500-word essay, something of hybrid between an op-ed and a paper. They took on these speed and genre challenges with intellectual rigor, a strong work ethic, and a great sense of camaraderie.

We could not have pulled this off without the incredible behind-the-scenes work of Jamie Foster, a first-year doctoral student in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Jamie went above and beyond the call of duty, dealing with all kinds of issues in a timely and efficient manner. We also acknowledge the financial support received from our respective departments.

We thank the staff at the Cherry Circle Room in the Chicago Athletic Association. Perhaps, if it weren’t for the delicious food and drinks they served us on a cold January evening, the book you now have in your hands might have only been a figment in our imaginations.

Last but not least, this project has been a team effort in which both of us contributed equally. Editorship order is just a function of the arbitrariness of alphabetical order.

Pablo J. Boczkowski (from Berlin, Germany) and Zizi Papacharissi (from the beautiful beaches of the Greek Islands), July 30, 2017

1

Introduction

Pablo J. Boczkowski and Zizi Papacharissi

Donald J. Trump’s ascendancy to the presidency of the United States took the world by storm and became a key moment of the still nascent twenty-first century. Analysts, pundits, politicians, and members of the public have feverishly tried to make sense of why this happened and what it might mean for the future of democratic life. Lots of explanations have been proposed and an even greater array of potential future scenarios have been floated in public discourse. This has naturally led to many disagreements that probably will be sorted out only with time. Beneath these disagreements, however, there are two ideas around which significant consensus has emerged.

First, the electoral victories, initially in the primaries and then in the general election, of Trump are to a certain extent extraordinary within the context of the American political system. While the electoral contests were unfolding, most observers in leading think tanks, the media, and the academy thought of them as relatively improbable outcomes. When he was finally declared the winner of the presidential contest on November 8, 2016, the dominant feeling in the establishment was one of deep surprise.

Second, there is a certain sense that the media played an important role in this extraordinary turn of events. This applies to both the news and social media individually, and even more so to the combination of them. From the apparent disconnect of the agenda-setting media with a vast segment of the American voters to the deluge of fake news circulating on social media, and from the intensity of the confrontation between President Trump and these media to his constant use of Twitter to promote alternative—and often unsupported by facts—narratives, there is a sense that the matrix that used to tie politics, media, technology, and the citizenry in fairly predictable ways has moved far away from equilibrium.

This book was born from the premise that these two ideas are connected, and that probing that connection provides a powerful window into broader transformations that mark the information landscape of the twenty-first century. We take the extraordinary character of the ascendancy to power and the leadership style of President Trump not as an exception or a fluke. On the contrary, we think that it that makes visible the fault lines underneath ordinary processes that have been evolving during several decades but were more difficult to ascertain during periods in which both electoral outcomes and political communication followed conventional, and therefore quite foreseeable, patterns—in the same way that the malfunctioning of a technological system does not create but reveals underlying design problems that were present long before the system breaks. Furthermore, this also applies to the news and social media: they did not become unsettled all of a sudden, but as part of evolutionary processes that are now easier to see and assess.

Making sense of these processes is challenging due to the complexity of the phenomena at stake and the recency of the main events in question. But it is also imperative to begin the discussion in order to contribute to ongoing scholarly and public conversations that can shape future trajectories in a constructive fashion. We tackle this challenge by asking a series of renowned scholars of communication, technology, and politics to contribute accessible essays focused on a key aspect of how the coming to power of Donald Trump intersects with the dynamics of information production, distribution, and reception in the news and/or social media. We do not aim to offer a comprehensive or definite account—much more time will have to pass before any text can accomplish that. By contrast, our goal is that, taken together, the essays in this volume can illuminate in a kaleidoscopic and timely manner some of the most critical and distinct dynamics that account for the nature of this president’s relationship to the media, provide historical context, and lay out possible future scenarios.

Thus, our aim is to present a collection of chapters that informs readers about questions lingering in the collective mind regarding such issues as the role of the press, digital information infrastructures, and social media; the character of a media and political system increasingly removed from a common ground and fragmented into disparate cultural enclaves; and alternative futures that might emerge from major shifts in media, politics, and the ties that bind them. We rely on the current populist moment to explicate, and contextualize, tendencies and tensions that have been developing for some time. Moments change and situations evolve. What is normal may gradually turn into a new normal between the time we write this introductory chapter and the moment the book is published. This does not negate our ability to do relevant work; quite the opposite. It invites us to produce work that addresses, yet is not trapped in, the moment. This is how we see our stance as scholars in general, and as editors of this volume in particular. We employ the present, long moment as an opportunity to rethink our roles as researchers, journalists, and citizens. In other words, we take advantage of the present, but do not fall prey to it. The chapters in this volume all take inspiration from, but move beyond, the contemporary situation so as to attain and retain their relevance for future analyses.

A lot can change in the next few months or years. A lot can stay the same. Therefore, our emphasis is on the Trump candidacy and the initial phase of his presidency as critical instances of more geographically and temporally extended phenomena, and certainly not the cause of the present media condition. In the chapters that follow, our contributors trace the roots of the dynamics that reinforce the contemporary impasse in journalism. As a result, we write about the relationship between truth and politics; editorial practices and conventions; facts, events, and reality; media and historicity; the economics and business of journalism. We use theory, previous research, and history to understand. These are our interpretive lenses as we consider the more contemporary vocabulary of fake news, alternative facts, clickbait headlines, and bot farms.

The volume is organized in four sections. The first one is titled Journalism in Question and considers the present position journalism finds itself in, the historical context that led to the current situation, and the role that the news media play in the business of truth-telling. The second section, Emotion, Populism, and Media Events, tackles these three topics as they relate to both our platforms for storytelling and the democratic process. The following section, titled Why Technology Matters, sheds light on the place of technology in news storytelling, social media conversations, and political communication strategies. The closing section, Pathways Ahead, outlines how the present context can either entrap us in state of embattled passivity or dynamically drive us to reinvent media practices and democratic life.

A number of themes coalesced as our contributors parsed these important issues. We want to conclude this introductory chapter by highlighting three of them: (1) the benefit of historical hindsight permits us to understand that our experiences are neither entirely new, nor a mere continuity of what came before; (2) the importance of situating the current moment within a preexisting crisis in journalism that exacerbates systemic tensions but also opens up new opportunities; and (3) the emergence of a distinct digital culture that has been shaped by longstanding social transformations and has also contributed to major social and political changes.

First, several contributors emphasize the deep historical roots of key tendencies and tensions in the relationships between Trump and the media that many commentators have treated as mostly novel. These tendencies and tensions have long occupied a certain place in the media and political landscape. Areas of continuity range from how current press–government confrontations draw upon notions of enemy formation that shaped editorial practice during the Cold War to the extent to which the commercial orientation of American journalistic institutions during the twentieth century prepared the ground for a news and social media system overly focused on profit and unable to contain the spread of false information, among others. This shows how contemporary tendencies and tensions have not developed overnight.

However, a historical sensibility also helps put in perspective significant discontinuities, such as how particular uses of social media have shifted to the frontstage of campaign messaging a lot of what used remain in the backstage of political communication, and how the democratic ideals embedded in the design of a platform like Twitter were subverted into a tool well suited for the spread of populist rhetoric. This is because, as Melvin Kranzberg famously remarked in his first law of technology:¹ technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral, thus its use can have divergent—and sometimes unforeseen—consequences when deployed in different historical eras and sociocultural milieux. The past survives in the present but does not determine it.

Second, as several of our contributors argue, it appears that the contemporary moment caught journalism rather unprepared, and in the middle of its own crisis. The social media metrics that favor clickbait headlines, eyeball economics, and bot-supported storytelling further confused a vocation that was already experiencing an existential conundrum of its own. Social media afford journalists ambience—an always-on presence. In addition, they offer seemingly direct connection to politicians and the public. But they also imply that journalists are no longer the first ones, nor the only ones, with access to the story. Journalism no longer has a monopoly on deciding what’s news—and perhaps, it never really did. As a result, facts are semantically renegotiated to a greater extent than before, and fake news and alternative facts have become part of our everyday vernacular. In order to move forward and, potentially, out of the matrix of misinformation connecting and confusing politicians, the media, and the public, journalism must reconsider its place in society. Social media enable journalists to have a connection to the public that can be employed so as to transform ambience into higher degrees of vigilance and relevance. It is through these heightened states of vigilance and relevance that journalism can rebuild networks of trust; give voice to diverse stories; reconnect publics that feel displaced, misunderstood, and insecure; and restore the fractured sociocultural fabric connecting diverse publics together.

Third, what has been happening to journalism is part of a larger transformation that is critical to the Trump and the media nexus: the emergence of a digital culture that combines high levels of top-down algorithmic power concentrated in the hands of a few corporations with equally high levels of bottom-up insurgency capabilities distributed among a myriad of individual and collective actors. If the former might give the impression that a few technological giants can determine our present—after all, what media corporation in history can boast reaching over a quarter of the population in the planet, like Facebook now does?—the latter should remind us of the vitality of avenues for contingent resistance and change. For instance, a social movement such as Black Lives Matter would not have the same ability to shape the national conversation about racial justice by relying solely on the information infrastructure of the past century. This tension between increasing level and concentration of top-down power on the one hand, and renewed strength and tactics for bottom-up intervention on the other hand, opens up a broad range of novel opportunities for action, from regulatory efforts taking place in Europe to street demonstrations of unparalleled scale and scope like the Women’s March that took place in cities around the globe on January 21, 2017. The potential future trajectories of our societies will depend in part on how this emerging digital culture is designed, governed, and appropriated in everyday life.

Taken together, the issues addressed in the chapters that follow invite designers, policy makers, journalists, and citizens to reconsider their ethos toward technology, communication, and civic life. Ethos includes ethics, but also evolves beyond ethics to speak to a particular sense of purpose when designing, governing, and using the digital infrastructure that subtends our societies. Thus, the events that culminated with the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States afford a unique opportunity to reflect on what kind of media ecosystem we want to build as a collective and why. An alternative ethos for journalists, designers, and politicians may be challenging to arrive at, because it requires working cooperatively. This runs contrary to the prevailing news media mentality of securing scoops and not sharing information. It also runs counter to a strong mindset in technology firms, which places emphasis on proprietary rights and locks up access to the algorithmic process that rules automation. And, finally, it defies the personalized nature of electoral processes, which more and more invite voters to choose increasingly simplified personas over complex projects that can only be realized collaboratively. Yet, in light of how high the stakes are, we are hopeful that journalists, technologists, and politicians can find new common ground. If anything, the present moment, lasting or fleeting, calls for a new ethos to take form.

Notes

1 Melvin Kranzberg, Kranzberg’s Laws, Technology and Culture 27 (July 1986): 544–560.

I

Journalism in Question

2

Why Journalism in the Age of Trump Shouldn’t Surprise Us

Barbie Zelizer

In the months since Donald Trump ascended to the US presidency, unexpected obstacles have been held responsible for preventing better coverage. This essay¹ argues, however, that journalism in the age of Trump is far more predictable than assumed, and that its analysts and observers would do well to assess why. It argues that deep mnemonic cues about enemy formation, consolidated and entrenched during the Cold War, have undermined coverage of the Trump phenomenon. Until their influence is more fully exposed, there is little chance of journalism moving beyond these cues.

On Enmity and Politics

Enmity is instrumental in political discourse, used by political leaders to help articulate who they are by defining what they are not. Although the notion of an enemy—he or she who is not us and who threatens us—constitutes what Kenneth Boulding (1959, 130) called the last stronghold of unsophistication, it nonetheless permeates in times of political uncertainty, disarray, and crisis, promoting behavior that sharpens distinctions between what is and is not seen as appropriate for the time.

A set of representational patterns launches this dynamic. Requiring clarity and simplicity and provoking anxiety over an imminent threat, enmity turn[s] established values upside down, with the otherwise forbidden newly encouraged (Beck 1997, 66). In so doing, enemy formation activates a range of negative behaviors—distrust, polarization, negative stereotyping, black-and-white thinking, aggression, deindividualization, and demonization (Spillmann and Spillmann 1997)—while fostering ethnic intolerance, racism, and political or religious fundamentalism (Beck 1997). Central to enmity are dichotomies, which reduce complex, unmanageable, and often indecipherable realities into binaries between us and them (Finlay, Holsti, and Fagen 1967). Often taking the shape of mirror images that position the two sides as opposites of each other, dichotomies produce a range of antithetical values—good/bad, right/wrong, moral/immoral—that keep the binary in place. Predictably, when enemy formation becomes the aim of one institutional domain, it is often introduced into other domains cohabiting the same institutional culture. This puts journalism in the direct path of enmity that is driven by political, economic, or other institutional concerns, leaving it subject to external objectives that may contradict its own.

Cold War Enmity, Cold War Journalism

Such was the case during the Cold War. Although not the only period in which journalism had been tasked with reflecting enmity crafted elsewhere, an entrenched set of newsmaking cues emerged during this period that were rarely thereafter questioned. In large part, this had to do with journalism’s centrality in driving the Cold War, whose prosecution depended on journalism’s buy-in.

The Cold War was driven by a deep mindset sustained over nearly five decades of international conflict between the US and the USSR and intensified domestically via McCarthyism. More an idea than a war, it took shape via populist impulses that were uniform, internally consistent, and steadfast in nature. As its ideological contours offered Americans unambiguous cues about what made an enemy, how one recognized its presence, and how one minimized the threat it brought, a very particular kind of journalism evolved in the war’s early years, much of it taken up with establishing and disseminating enmity (Zelizer n.d.). That enmity cast the war’s central antagonists—the US and the USSR—as polarized, mirrored opposites of each other and propelled a hunt for the enemy within US boundaries. In this mindset, neutrality disappeared.

Unusual here—and a direct precursor to current circumstances—was journalism’s instrumentality. With no battles, physical destruction, or corpses on its main front, the Cold War needed instructional, exhortative, propagandistic, and pedagogic efforts to instill and maintain the necessary mindset of war. It was thus up to actors on the mediated landscape to intensify the psychic distance between a democratic US and a communist USSR so that everyone remembered the conflict at hand.

Echoing journalism’s predilection for clear, dramatic, and simple formations of conflict, the larger ideological environment of the time easily displayed what Hofstadter (1964, 3–4) later called heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy. The need to emphasize the conflict between absolute good and absolute evil remained high:

What is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated. (Hofstadter 1964, 82)

Although ideological stridency raised different kinds of problems across institutional culture writ large, it was particularly problematic for journalists, who were torn between two dissonant goals—maintaining independence or servicing an ideological anticommunist environment.

The latter goal took precedence over the former. As many journalists became Cold War navigators—relying, in one view, less on facts and more on moral assumptions about how the world was to operate (Adler 1991, 43)—they readily sustained the binary between us and them, strengthening rhetoric about US democracy and fostering a negative image of the Russians and communism. Political pressures—tendered via red-line edits on news copy, subtle censorship, loyalty oaths, dismissal, and special favors in exchange for sympathetic coverage—reminded journalists to mind their perspectives carefully (Liebovich 1988); economic trends toward corporatism and consumer capitalism made bucking the line more difficult (Hixson 1996); and television’s technological predilection for briefer and more formulaic relays readily cohered with Cold War aims (Bernhard 1999), to say nothing of a public largely indifferent to the news. It thus became easier for journalists to downplay the problematic aspects of current events and overstate those consonant with Cold War enmity.

But none of this would have succeeded had Cold War enmity not rested on longstanding journalistic conventions and practices. The embrace of enmity firstly required deference and moderation, which helped turn journalists into eager spokespeople for those in power. Self-censorship and currying favor happened regularly, as when Look magazine featured a cover story titled How to Spot a Communist (Cheme 1947). As the trade journal Editor and Publisher proclaimed in 1948, "Americans are Americans