Winners and Losers in Our New Media Moment

Now, media speculation about possible candidates for the next presidential election starts just before that November 4th; that is, four years early.  The first “primaries,” actually tryouts before clustered groups of billionaires, take place early in the year before the election.  The first “debates” are launched as that summer ends and the first primaries take place just after the actual election year begins.  In the intense two-year-plus, money-raising, money-squandering 2016 race to the White House (and other federal offices) as much as $5 billion in ads (up from $3.8 billion in 2012) are expected to flicker across TV screens, as incredible sums pour into TV stations and networks.

Election 2016 is already an eye-popping spectacle.  No wonder, then, that television news, profiting so from the expanding election season, would anoint it as a new kind of 24/7 entertainment event.  In recent years, this decision has led to a profusion of long-before-the-first-primary “debates,” increasingly organized by TV news departments as political food fights.  Similarly, coverage of candidates touring the country has increased as they are goaded to offer ever more incendiary “positions” for the news cycle.  In fact, the most recent debates, particularly the Republican ones, have garnered record audiences, larger than any recent World Series game or National Basketball League final.  Think of it as the O.J. phenomenon triumphant. And at least one network nabob, Les Moonves of CBS News, is openly cheering it all on.  “The more they spend, the better it is for us and: Go Donald! Keep getting out there!” he said in a call to investors. 

Turn on MSNBC or Fox News or CNN these days and, even when nothing much is happening, you can sometimes watch election “coverage” hour after mind-bending hour.  This is, of course, the perfect atmosphere for an entertaining demagogue with endless surprises up his sleeve.  Not surprisingly, the focus these days has ceaselessly been on Donald Trump — what he says and who denounces him and which experts debunk his latest claim and what part of the Republican demographic remains supportive of him when it comes to deporting Mexicans or creating a registry for American Muslims, or shutting down mosques, or simply banning non-citizen Muslims from the U.S. 

Each Trump provocation, the reactions to it (which only stoke it further), and the discovery that he’s either lost no ground or gained some among potential Republican primary voters represent another tiny news cycle in our brave new media world and is analyzed as such.  There can be no denying that the Donald has a remarkably canny sense of how to up the ante and glue cameras to himself, but far more of the focus of this moment should be on the media, rather than him alone.  He is, in a sense, the creature of the new 24/7 media environment, the permanent campaign trail, and the reinvention of the news cycle as a fear machine.  He is the spawn of what could be termed our new “spectaculection.”  He couldn’t exist without it.

He is the natural-born product of a media landscape in which a single gruesome act of Islamic State-inspired terrorism and workplace rage can become the wallpaper for our American world.  It’s an environment in which the threat, including Trump himself, is king, in which prosperity and ratings (for the TV news) mean fear for Americans.  In its own way, the mainstream media, like the police and the populace, are arming themselves to the teeth.  Donald Trump only makes sense in such a context.  His is the extremism of our new media world, which represents the true trumpery of our moment.

The winners of the latest version of the news and election cycle won’t be the American people or the electoral system or a deeper knowledge of how our world works.  Those winners will, however, include Washington’s national security state, which has bet its future on American fear, and the Islamic State, for which this media environment is the royal road to a completely irrational, even cockamamie “clash of civilizations.”

In other words, the news is the news, and it couldn’t be worse.

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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