For the media outrage machine, Trump will be a hard habit to kick
Much of America’s liberal-dominated media cast aside even the pretence of objectivity during the Trump era. Can it sober up?
In November 2016, three weeks after the election of Donald Trump as America’s president, Mark Thompson, the chief executive of The New York Times, joined friends for dinner at a French bistro in mid-town Manhattan. He was in a surprisingly buoyant mood.
Trump may be bad news for America, the former BBC chief told the table, but he is going to be good for business. He pointed out The New York Times had sold hundreds of thousands of subscriptions in a matter of weeks.
Thompson was right: Trump was a ratings godsend. Four years of his presidential opera provided a much-needed boost to struggling newspapers and flailing cable news networks. Reliably outrageous, insidious, comic and terrifying all at once: Trump became the media’s patron saint — in business terms, at least.
Digital subscriptions to The New York Times nearly doubled in the first year of Trump’s presidency. The MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, one of Trump’s most vocal critics, smashed her ratings records, pulling in as many as five million viewers for prime time interviews with the president’s niece, Mary Trump, and his former lawyer Michael Cohen.
Meanwhile conservative outlets such as Fox News and Newsmax, which tended to defend the president and heap scorn on his critics, also feasted on the carnival of outrage and culture war. Love him or loathe him, America became addicted to Trump.
Yet now, as the former president mulls his future on the Mar-a-Lago golf course, the dominant question is: how will the media — and the country at large — move on? Can they kick the Trump habit? Will objectivity and sobriety return to American media, or are they relics of a bygone era?
There was a cost to the ratings windfall. Much of America’s liberal-dominated media cast aside even the pretence of objectivity during the Trump era, openly viewing the president as an existential threat to America and the world. They certainly held him to account, but also went overboard at times, issuing such a relentless drumbeat of negative coverage, they were at times accused of having “Trump derangement syndrome”. This is one reason a recent Edelman poll found fewer than half of Americans trust traditional media, an all-time low.
There was a backlash too: many blamed Trump’s political rise on CNN’s obsessive coverage and the hours of free airtime they gave him when he ran for the White House five years ago.
Watching the liberal media engage in mortal combat with Trump further alienated his millions of supporters. And once the hosannas of joy that greeted last week’s Biden inauguration have abated, networks are facing the possibility of a vast Trump-shaped hole in their schedules. “There’s obviously going to be a crash in interest in national politics,” said Ben Smith, a media columnist at The New York Times. “Trump was incredibly good at keeping our attention.”
John Harris, the founding editor of Politico, believes America desperately needs to move on not only from its Trump obsession but also the broader “contempt industry” that has developed over the past four decades and helped create the division that led to events such as the Capitol Hill riot on January 6.
“Trump gave voice to contempt, then stimulated yet more contempt in return,” Harris said. “That contempt does become kind of addictive after a while: you can’t turn off the set; you live in a state of rage and agitation. It’s terrible to have this model where people are making money and also reaping vast rewards — career success, validation — from stimulating this politics of contempt.”
Moving on from the politics of contempt will be easier said than done. With Trump having been kicked off Twitter, there is a growing clamour among some liberals to expel him from the public square entirely. Yet for ratings-hungry news channels, it will be difficult to achieve.
“It’s a symbiotic relationship between them and Trump,” said Ariana Pekary, a politics producer at MSNBC for seven years before she resigned last year, calling cable news a “cancer” on America.
She believes the liberal media, which have often viewed themselves as a solution to Trump, are in fact part of America’s broader problem, amplifying the country’s divisions through hyperbole and melodrama.
“Whether they realise it or not, they often make the problem worse,” she said. “There is of course genuine fascination with Trump, like watching a car crash, but I think as journalists we should rise above that. In a for-profit news model, though, they have no incentive to do that.”
Another fear that many liberals have is that continued coverage of Trump will keep him in the public eye, giving him the attention he needs to remain a powerful force in national politics.
“That’s how he gets back in,” said Tim Snyder, a professor of history at Yale and trenchant Trump critic. “He’ll try to turn himself into a martyr and create a grievance narrative about how he is the victim in all of this. The media need to be very careful about how they cover him.”
In a matter of weeks, Trump’s second impeachment trial in the Senate will begin, guaranteeing several more rounds of headlines. Will Republicans risk an internal schism and vote to convict him? How will he fight back? The Trump impeachment trial threatens to overshadow the crucial first 100 days of the Biden administration.
Snyder acknowledges the risk, but believes holding Trump to account for January 6 is more important. “There has to be some kind of accountability for what happened,” he said. “There needs to be a process.”
Others hope that having the more anodyne figure of Biden in the White House will turn the temperature down and speed up America’s Trump detox.
For while conservative media are already revving up to savage the new administration, getting viewers frothing mad about the generally avuncular Biden is a tricky task.
“Biden doesn’t fit that contempt industry very well — he just isn’t catnip for that crowd,” Harris said. “He naturally doesn’t excite the kind of cultural battles that the Obamas did, the Clintons did and certainly Trump did.”
For all that media ratings and readership might drop without the Trump effect, there may be some benefits too. Many journalists are looking forward to turning their attention to a plethora of other American issues.
“The national story remains incredibly toxic and not the place that you’re going to find common ground and heal the country,” said Smith, who believes that focusing more on local issues is one way to calm the national mood. “I’d certainly like to write about Trump as little as I can,” he said.