Abstract
Trump and the Media examines “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.” The editors’ aim is that “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 be the media, provide historical context, and lay out possible future scenarios.”
Kaleidoscopic indeed. Reading this book is a bit like dropping in on a cocktail party where a number of your favorite scholars (along with some you may not have yet met) are avidly debating our current president, the media, and the state of democracy. Each paints a vivid picture in broad strokes of what ails the media system, politics, and academic theories of media and politics. The effect for the reader is stimulating and provocative (for the reviewer, this kaleidoscope presents a challenge in giving due credit to all the stimulating ideas presented).
Among the broad range of questions raised across the 27 essays in this volume is whether the kind of media coverage that attended the Trump campaign reflects a new problem, or an enduring one. While Michael Delli Carpini argues that Trumpism “is a culmination of trends that have been occurring for several decades” and a “fundamental shift in the relationships between journalism, politics, and democracy,” and Victor Pickard contends that Trump is “a symptom of structural media failures” many decades in the making, Dave Karpf writes in the book’s closing essay that “Trump’s victory was not the inevitable culmination of the slow problems in political journalism”—the kinds of problems that we scholars are inclined to analyze. Instead, he contends, “Trump’s relationship with the media poses an unprecedented all-at-once problem.”
Other debates running through these essays concern journalists’ culpability for Trump’s victory; what role social media and “fake news” really played in Trump’s election; and how journalists, the news industry, and policy makers should respond to Trump’s repeated misrepresentation of facts and his efforts to undermine legacy media’s legitimacy. Ultimately, to my reading, the most revealing insights contained in this volume are not about the media, per se, but about factors beyond the media that have fueled the Trump phenomenon. While journalists tried mightily to fact-check Trump’s many fabrications, Julia Sonnevend argues, the mythology created and evoked by the Trump campaign “could not have been beaten by a set of carefully-aligned facts.” And for all the hand-wringing about fake news, Daniel Kreiss argues, “Many citizens understand politics and accept information through the lens of partisan identity”—which on the political right is now shot through with racial resentments—a dynamic that “has largely become unmoored from legacy journalism.”
As much as a book like this is needed to better understand the present topsy-turvy political moment, focusing too closely on Trump may obscure as well as illuminate. While it is undeniably valuable to understand the Trump phenomenon in terms of the myths and identity politics Trump’s campaign traded on, as well as the social media strategies (addressed in this volume by Fred Turner and others) that kept Trump perpetually at the top of the news cycle and mobilized his base, these strategies in reality only went so far, and the Electoral College accomplished the rest. The fact that Trump now sits in the White House should not encourage us to overlook the dynamics that drove Hillary Clinton voters, for example—a group that outnumbered Trump voters by some 3 million.
Readers may also notice that a book written so early in the Trump presidency contributes to a somewhat lopsided focus on how Trump prevailed in the 2016 election, focusing less on the question of how the victor ultimately will fare in office and what his presidency represents for American democracy. Some (e.g., Susan Douglas) start from the assumption that the Trump presidency is already crumbling before our eyes. Others (e.g., Katy Pearce) argue that Trump cannot be classified as an authoritarian leader. It is early in the game to be making such calls, particularly considering that a second Trump term is entirely possible.
That said, one of the most valuable aspects of Trump and the Media is how it invites us to theorize the future of our contemporary “media regime” (Delli Carpini). How that regime will evolve depends on many things, but a critical factor will be how the press chooses to respond to Trump’s particular style of political communication. A press that during the campaign became addicted to Trump’s brash unpredictability—“He didn’t always have to do something in particular [to win media coverage],” Mike Annany observes, “he just had to seem like he might do anything at all”—now has to recalibrate if it hopes to serve its democratic purpose. Essays by Sue Robinson, David Karpf, and Pablo Boczkowski and Seth Lewis point provocatively to how journalism might reinvent itself.
Overall, Trump and the Media aims to be both timely and timeless—to “take advantage of the present, but [to] not fall prey to it,” as the editors put it. Trump and the Media leaves the reader eager to engage in the conversation herself, particularly as it requires the reader to synthesize so many perspectives. It should provoke much lively debate in classrooms and in our future research.