14 October 2020 (Chania, Crete) – I am seven hours ahead of the East Coast of the U.S. and this morning when I logged onto Twitter (I know, always my first mistake of the day) I saw two media stories trending: NBC News was hosting a town hall with Trump tomorrow night at the exact same time as ABC News was hosting a town hall with Biden, and the New York Post was running a story about a presidential candidate’s emails. I thought “Welcome to October 2016”. Again.
Trump backs out of a official scheduled debate but then gets a 3-hour public platform where he can talk ad nauseam. My sources at NBC (not on-line talent but better – back-line staffers) tell me the frustration with and anger toward their employer for scheduling a town hall against Biden is boiling over.
Perhaps the only good point: my guess is you’ll find that NBC’s rating will be at least double that of ABC’s. I’ll be interested to see the results. If I’m wrong I’ll be the first to admit it. But it will be a good test of whether the polls speak the truth or not. It will be an easy night for Trump. NBC is using their worst interviewer, Savannah Guthrie, who has a track record for not asking follow up questions.
But it does (again) point to the power of the media and where they are placing their hopes if not necessarily their bets. I think they want Trump reelected. More clicks, more $$$. A long time friend who has been on the business side of several large news networks reminded me of NBC News’ 2016 town hall forum with both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. It was on the U.S.S Intrepid, a hulking aircraft carrier-slash-museum that is docked on the west side of Manhattan. He said:
It was an event dubbed “the Commander-in-Chief forum” and designed to take questions on national security, military affairs and veterans issues from NBC News and an audience comprised mainly of military veterans and active service members.
I remember sitting in my Brooklyn apartment watching when the camera pans behind Matt Lauer (the moderator) and Clinton and I see, in the front row, right over Clinton’s right shoulder, several major NBC News ad sales execs. Including my boss’s boss.
It’s not uncommon, or particularly inappropriate for employees of a news network to attend an event like this. But I did wonder why all those network business execs were there (and in the front row!) and if they had clients with them. It was a good reminder of how much power the ad sales side has at media companies. Because at the end of the day, if news and sales were in conflict, the money always seemed to take precedence over the news angle.
The reason why tomorrow night’s events are town halls and not a real debate? Because Trump didn’t want to hold a virtual debate. The New York Times reports:
Mr. Biden’s town hall has been on the books since last week, after Mr. Trump, who had recently contracted the coronavirus, rejected plans to convert the second formal presidential debate into a virtual matchup; the debate was eventually canceled. In an interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo, Trump said “I’m not going to waste my time doing a virtual debate.”
Neither of these town halls are affiliated with the Commission on Presidential Debates, which means, from a business perspective, each network will pocket all of the ads and sponsorships associated with the town hall. NBC News is receiving lots of blowback, as people are not pleased with the network a) cowing to Trump; b) airing a Trump town hall in direct opposition to Biden’s, meaning that the whole point of having a news network help society be informed so they can make better decisions gets thrown out the window.
This wasn’t the only stupid media story of the day. Because then there’s the New York Post. The Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid ran a fantastical cover today about supposed Biden emails and basically a giant conspiracy theory about Biden’s son, Hunter, and a Ukranian company called Burisma. It cannot be overstated how clearly bullshit the Post “secret emails” story is. It comes from a known conduit of Russian disinformation, who says the information has been in his possession for nearly a year while he rabble-roused about this very subject and never disclosed it: Rudolph Giuliani. Giuliani held this through impeachment, through a Senate investigation, etc., then feeds it to a friendly paper 20 days out from an election. Responsible reporters should make Giuliani’s conduct the center of attention and skepticism here, not his payload of sketchy info. But they did not.
Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall added an interesting tidbit:
This was a story that demanded significant forensic analysis/confirmation and there was none. And the “lead reporter” was Emma-Jo Morris, the former segment producer/booker for Sean Hannity.
The incendiary story got even more oxygen when Bloomberg and the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman uncritically shared the story to their followers. Bill Weir from CNN puts it best:
There was a far, far better way to cover this: that for months, Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani pushed a story that a Delaware computer repairman found damning Biden info on a waterlogged laptop inexplicably left in his shop. That there was no FBI attribution after FBI investigation. Echos of 2016.
But I think the exemplar of Washington political journalism today is this Axios piece today about how “Joe Biden is the luckiest, least scrutinized front-runner.” For starters, it’s a piece handed to Axios by the Trump campaign and it repeats the Trump campaign piece almost verbatim. It would be like running a story from your dog about why your cat gets treated so well.
It’s a tactic I wrote about (that many have written about) regarding threat actors – including from Russia, not just Republicans – who will continue to try to manipulate public debate globally and in the US, including by trying to trick journalists into doing their amplification for them.
The cynic in me says it is all about, only about the money. The press figured out how to profit from Trump’s presidency faster than it learned how to properly cover it. And, indeed, Trump knew how to play them. Trump is as critical of large media organizations as he is dependent on them. As the journalism professor and media analyst Jay Rosen has written, the normal descriptors of presidential politics fail to do justice to a leader who is fundamentally abnormal – he is a fount of public falsehoods and his ideology is not a fixed vision but rather a kaleidoscope of self-scrambling particles. It earns clicks so it earns money. Trump revealed the unfortunate mechanism of media economics, which is that it is highly profitable for media companies to merchandise anxiety, just as Trump considers it profitable to hold up the press as a permanent enemy of his administration and supporters.
I am reminded of the now famous interview with CBS President Leslie Moonves in 2016 when he said the media should not be scolded for the clicks and kicks they provide to readers. The media has an open incentive to promote Trump … and he openly delighted in the ad money:
“What a fun Trump campaign brought to my network. And the money. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going!!”
And Trump’s saturation of the media market in 2016 showed he knew how to play the game. Instead of relying on traditional methods of communication – paid advertising, carefully-chosen interviews, corporate-crafted Facebook posts – he became the medium and the message, unpredictable and always around.
But still, I am sick of my journalism colleagues. We’re seeing a huge error, and an absolute tragedy, unfold in real time. That’s a sentence that should apply to countless aspects of economic, medical, governmental, and environmental life at the moment. What I have in mind, though, is the almost unbelievable failure of much of the press to respond to the realities of the Trump age.
As for next month, nobody has a clue how any of this will play out. I think too many of my colleagues in the U.S. have placed too much faith in the electoral process. The U.S. Constitution does not secure the peaceful transition of power, but rather presupposes it. The worst case is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that uncertainty to hold on to power. But should it come to pass, the Republicans are already planning to destroy a Biden Presidency.