Abstract
Even the media that supported him turned by the end, but don’t bet against a return
The coverage of Donald Trump’s attempt at re-election, as with so much else in his presidency, ended bizarrely. Election night stretched into election week, and we may even have a full election month by the time Trump has finished with all his promised legal actions and demands for recounts. While Joe Biden claimed the prize he has been pursuing for decades, Trump spent the days after the election scorching the White House earth, blaming the media, state electoral systems, anyone who might have had it in for him.
Even his enduring ally, Rupert Murdoch, received a blistering call on election night when the conservative Fox News was the first to declare Arizona for Biden. Fox’s non-partisan psephologists stuck to their call, and Murdoch backed them up. There is no surer sign of a politician’s imminent demise than Murdoch tiptoeing out of the room. Everyone knew this would be a challenging election to cover. Trump would spin whatever story he wanted out of the vote. He had spent weeks laying the groundwork, challenging the validity of mail-in ballots and votes in this time of Covid.
And as the polling stations closed on the evening of November 3, you got a sense of a media on very best behaviour, not wanting to give the slightest excuse for either side to challenge their coverage. Cable stations which have spent four years excoriating Trump – MSNBC – or lionising him – Fox – were suddenly dead serious about their impartiality. There is a gravity about the sight of millions of Americans lining up to vote that takes the circus element out of the coverage.
The New York Times’ media columnist Ben Smith wrote after the election that “politics used to be covered as a kind of a sport, but it doesn’t feel like that any more”. Trump raised the stakes for the country by moving so far from the political centre. He also raised the stakes for reporters by attacking them personally at his rallies, press conferences and, most consistently, on Twitter. Organisations such as The New York Times have been internally shredded by the Trump presidency, which coincided with a maturing of digital media. A culture war has blown up between the mostly liberal younger staff, who run the digital operations at news organisations, and the more wizened reporters, who still have to develop leads and talk to the objects of their ire.
Opinion, in the digital age, is more important than ever to newspapers’ subscribers and revenues and it has bled into all sorts of other coverage. Just as Trump has made every issue a cultural issue, from the sports he likes to the wearing of face masks against the coronavirus, everything in news has become political. And as the wait for an election result dragged on, sure enough, it became impossible for the reporters and editors to remain above the fray. When Trump gave a press conference two days after the election and claimed that “if you count the legal votes, I easily win”, several networks cut him off, saying he was lying. Lester Holt, the host of NBC Nightly News, broke in after a few minutes to say: “We have to interrupt here, because the president made a number of false statements, including the notion that there has been fraudulent voting. There has been no evidence of that.” The disrespect Trump has shown the media was returned to him and his office in spades. CNN’s chief media correspondent Brian Stelter turned off notifications for Trump’s tweets live during his media discussion show Reliable Sources. The two-and-a-half months between election day and the inauguration of the new president promises much more of the same.
Initially, it seemed as though all but the most extreme corners of the pro-Trump press had accepted his loss. Even the pro-Trump Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote three days after the election: “[Trump] has accomplished a great deal since descending on that Trump Tower escalator in 2015, including his historic first victory and a strong re-election performance when he was supposed to lose in a rout. We’d hate to see that legacy ruined by a refusal to accept the normal transfer of power.”
But as the days passed and more senior Republicans showed support for Trump’s decision to challenge the validity of the results, the Trump media began falling back into line. Fox had little interest in people dancing in the streets for Joe Biden when it had all the makings of weeks more of controversy. The more liberal left insists it is going to ignore the bulk of what Trump does in the coming weeks and focus instead on Joe Biden’s work to build an administration and set new priorities. But it will be difficult. Nearly half the country voted for Trump and won’t appreciate the smack of elitist disdain. And then there is the issue of ratings. Trump has always been box office.
Jeff Zucker, the head of CNN, wrote to his employees after the election: “Last week was our most-watched week ever. More people watched the election coverage on CNN than any other network, cable or broadcast. We had five of our most-watched 10 days in history last week.”
Facebook and Twitter went into this election season on high alert, scarred by the 2016 race, when social media was accused of being hijacked by foreign powers and political extremes. This year, both companies were more proactive about moderating and editing content. They removed Trump’s most misleading posts about coronavirus in the run-up to the election. Afterwards, Facebook banned the 350,000-strong pro-Trump group “Stop the Steal” after it encouraged violence to challenge the result. Other groups with similar agendas keep cropping up and Facebook has promised to keep an eye on them.
Trump is not expected to go quietly, even if he does finally accept his defeat. He can run again in four years and is far and away the dominant figure in his party. Biden may have chased him out of the White House, but he will struggle to fill the media void Trump leaves behind.
