Wednesday, February 17, 2021

The Mass Media’s Post-Trump Reckoning

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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