Donald Trump and the New ‘News’ Zone

The menu of the news, as presently defined, lowers your chance of understanding the world.  It is, however, likely to raise your blood pressure and your fears on a planet in which there is plenty of reason to be afraid, but seldom of what’s on screen.  In a sense, at its best, what the all-day obsession that’s still called “the news” really provides is the kind of rush that we might normally associate with a drug or an addiction rather than reportage or analysis.

The news — no matter your screen of choice — increasingly does several things:

* It creates its own heightened, insular world to replace the world we actually live in.

* At its most effective, it’s like a recurrent floodtide washing over you.

* It has an obsessional quality, with single stories engulfing everything else, inducing a deeply skewed view of the world, no matter what event or events are being followed.

Who can doubt that the Internet, social media, email, and the rest of the package are the signature addictive activities of our age?  Anyone who can put away that iPhone without resistance, or not check one last time to see if the email you weren’t expecting has arrived, should join the short line now forming at the exit.  For the rest of us, let’s face it, we’re trapped here.

The “news” is a key part of this addictive package.  In a sense, in an age of electronic obsession, onscreen news purveyors like Moonves may have little choice but to make it so.  It’s that or, assumedly, watch your cable network or key news programs die a grim financial death.

And of course Donald Trump, he of the trademark bouffant comb-over — yes, I’m back to him — is certainly sui generis and regularly admired for the deft way he plays the news and the media.  He’s less commonly thought of as the creature of the news and the media.  In a sense, though, he’s their ultimate creation of this moment, the top-of-the-line drug on offer so far.  If he’s also the ultimate narcissist without filters, then perhaps what we still call “the news” is itself a new form of narcissism.  When you look in the mirror it holds up, it’s not you or the world that’s reflected.  Just tell me, I’m curious: Whose hairdo do you see?

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

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