By Michael Brendan Dougherty
Wednesday, February 17, 2021
President Biden harrumphed upon being asked about Donald
Trump. “I’m tired of talking about Donald Trump. I don’t want to talk about him
anymore,” the president said. Not a surprise. Impeachment wasn’t even that
popular. Senator Schumer declined the chance to have witnesses and extend the
trial. So much the better for Biden and his agenda. But Biden doesn’t drive the
clicks.
Luckily, Donald Trump has broken his post-election
silence. And the most relieved constituency in America should be the liberal
media.
Why? Because Donald Trump will be the last president of
the mass-media age. His rise to the presidency should be conceived of as a
mediarise. He went from being a kind of tabloid and talk-show star, to being a
shorthand all-media symbol of brash wealth, to becoming one of the most
valuable properties of NBC prime time, and then the most valuable talent on a
major social network, Twitter. I’ll be surprised if Twitter doesn’t reverse its
Trump ban and bring him back on. Like reruns of The Office, Trump is a
franchise from which others can extract value.
And hardly anyone has extracted more than the liberal
media. A decade ago the New York Times was heading toward bankruptcy and
turning toward Carlos Slim for a lifeline. But in the Trump years, the
digital-subscription business took off like a rocket. The Times tripled
its number of digital subscribers during the Trump era. And it’s been on a
hiring spree. Have you noticed that half of Vox now works for the Times?
But we may look back upon his presidency as the final
chapter in the mass-media-age morality tale. What is mass media but the church
of a liberal clerisy? James Poulos, of the Claremont Institute, has held out
that broadcast media — the television age — created a clerisy dedicated to
projecting “ethical dreams” onto our screens. And these dreams and narratives
were in turn put into our newspapers as well.
If Trump is the last mass-media president, he will turn
out to have been the “final boss” in that liberal clerisy’s video game, the
Voldemort at the end of Harry Potter, the dragon at the end of John’s
Revelation.
Our media mavens can sense that the culture and
technology of broadcast is breaking apart under the pressure of digital
technology. But they haven’t grasped the true implications.
In a column dedicated to unearthing why the New York
Times plays such an outsized role in the media, and why its controversies
seem to portend major trends in the culture, Ben Smith writes:
The Times’s unique position
in American news may not be tenable. This intense attention, combined with a
thriving digital subscription business that makes the company more beholden to
the views of left-leaning subscribers, may yet push it into a narrower and more
left-wing political lane as a kind of American version of The Guardian —
the opposite of its stated, broader strategy.
But the Times departed from serving a broad “public”
audience a long time ago and pitched itself to the same upwardly mobile,
metropole liberal audience as The Guardian a long time ago. What is new,
and what is interesting about the Times, is that it faces two
interlocking crises.
A future with so many more media alternatives will be a
treacherous one for the Times’ business. And the collapse of media
authority generally strikes at the heart of the liberal clerisy’s
self-conception. These two crises are driving the conflict between liberal
“institutionalists” at the Times and the young “woke.” They have
conflicting visions of where the Times must take its authority in the
new age. The institutionalists lean into the traditional standards of
journalism, with its nods toward “both sides” and its moral gradualism. The
wokesters stake their claim on the moral authority and social mission of the
press.
This internal battle at the Times and other media
organizations is preparation for times of scarcity. There will be downsizing,
and wokesters — many of them Millennials or younger — want to make their claim
on the few important sinecures left.
But that’s not all. Poulos holds that the old mass-media
mandarins are trying to “encode” their ethical dreams into the new
digital-media world, before it is too late. One can see this most clearly in
the moral panic about social media and which speakers get a platform on it. The
New York Times doesn’t report on what is being said on new social-media
networks such as Clubhouse; it reports on what shouldn’t be said there.
Yesterday the Times tweeted its latest story this way:
Unfettered conversations are taking
place on Clubhouse, an invitation-only app that lets people gather in audio
chatrooms.
The platform has exploded in
popularity, despite grappling with concerns over harassment, misinformation and
privacy.
Oh no, look! It is media — but media free from the
control of the responsible liberal clerisy.
The new digital media has its own biases. It also has
elements of fantasy. But its currency and legitimacy — its value as a business
— comes not from ethical dreams, but the secure database management of events,
which it interprets as truths. Many Silicon Valley founders and thinkers have
intuited this and tried to make themselves fall in love with the idea of hard
and unpleasant truths — the things that cannot be uttered ethically at places
like the New York Times.
The conflict between one clerisy and another is just
beginning.
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