The remarkable Dan Froomkin speculates about media’s wanting Trump to run—and win—in 2024. He concludes: “I don’t think the mainstream media really wants Trump to win again. But I have a hard time explaining its behavior in any other way.” This mistakenly credits media with a sense of responsibility to the public.
Froomkin admirably believes that there is a moral imperative at the core of journalism. He chides political journalists, in particular, for treating the prospects of a Trump candidacy “as some combination of foregone conclusion and parlor game, rather than as a grave danger” to American democracy.
But journalists bleat about the greater public good only when they, themselves, are in the cross-hairs of a cranky politician or law enforcement. That’s when they bring out the First Amendment artillery and blast away at the “chilling effects” any form of their accountability purportedly would have on the republic’s survival.
In all other respects, media exist to make money. To accomplish that, they need consumers of their wares. To attract consumers, the press must induce them with offers of what they want. Like all profit-driven enterprises, they expend a lot of effort to discern the preferences of their customers.
News consumers are also voters, of course. This means that the press and candidates for public office pursue the attention of the same people. The resulting ménage à trois has candidates use the press to sell themselves to voters who, by their news consuming choices, determine how the press does the selling.
The public gets what it wants. What does it want? More broadly: What is the American voter’s relationship to politics? In 2012, the historian, Jill Lepore, explained it at length by describing, in “The Lie Factory: How politics became a business,” the origins of the political consulting industry in 1930s California.
By the 1950s, that industry had transformed American politics. Political consultants had replaced party bosses, with political power gained not by votes but by money. … “Every voter, a consumer” became—and remains—the operating principle for political campaigns.
The first consultants—Leone Baxter and Clem Whitaker (“Campaign, Inc.”)—were masters at understanding the voting public: “The average American doesn’t want to be educated; he doesn’t want to improve his mind; he doesn’t even want to work, consciously, at being a good citizen.” True in the 1930s, true today.
What does the voter want? According to Whitaker (who won 70 out of 75 campaigns for his clients), “a good hot battle, with no punches pulled”, or a show (voters like “the movies … mysteries, … fireworks and parades”). Put on a good show and “Mr. and Mrs. America will turn out to see it.” Trump offers both. And media CFOs beam.
A known sociopath like Trump may prevail in 2024. Why? Because of the correlation between the rising complexity of the 21st-century world and the public’s dwindling attention span and demand to be entertained. Whitaker again: “A wall goes up when you try to make Mr. and Mrs. Average American Citizen work or think.”
This explains the sound-bite. Candidates and press alike strain to simplify their message and news coverage, aware that “[t]he more you have to explain, the more difficult it is to win support.” Baxter: “Words that lean on [a voter’s] mind are no good.” In terms of public policy, the sub-optimal result is a desired meaninglessness.
Even Nixon advisors understood. “Voters are basically lazy … uninterested in making an effort to understand. … Impression is easier in that it makes no intellectual demand (for most people “the most difficult work of all”). “The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable.”
Today, the nature of the voting public and the press catering to it remains what it has been for a hundred years. Unfortunately for Democrats, the need to simplify complex issues for a politically illiterate, emotion-driven public inherently puts them at a disadvantage, committed as they are to governing rather than to power for its own sake.
Contrary to Froomkin’s expectation, media will not—because they don’t see themselves as having the duty to—clear the fog generated by candidates for public office to distract and mislead the voters. There is zero incentive to do so. If it did, news consumers might punish them by seeking their news elsewhere.
This means 81 million are condemned to the seemingly endless media will-he-run-or-won’t-he parlor game. Froomkin “suspect[s] it’s [out of] cowardice, rather than avarice. They’re afraid that if they sound the alarm, they’ll be written off as biased and untrustworthy.” But bias and lack of trust go to the bottom line. Ergo, it’s ultimately about avarice.
