The search to explain Americans’ all-time low trust in media can find no simpler explanation than broadcast networks’ and news magazines’ handling of Donald J. Trump since he descended the infamous escalator in 2015.
The lies and false claims such as the Russia-collusion narrative and “very fine people” hoax torched media credibility, but the media didn’t get the message. The smears against Trump and the MAGA movement have become so desperate as to become dangerous.
Chyrons like these don’t just imply that Trump is Hitler
— John Hasson (@SonofHas) October 28, 2024
They also imply that Trump voters are Nazis (and should be treated accordingly)
Incredibly dangerous and irresponsible pic.twitter.com/aMpm8NJIlF
The structure of media itself may have its role: national television networks such as NBC, FOX, and CNN aren’t subject to FCC licensing—in other words, a lucrative benefit that confers free reign to operate. A stamp of approval without the paperwork.
Add to that the massive tailwind from advertisers, including such self-interested sponsors of news content as banks and credit card companies and pharmaceuticals, and it’s increasingly apparent how editorial newsrooms’ hands are tied.
To borrow a term from manufacturing, media are more or less vertically integrated. In a vertically integrated factory, a chunk of raw aluminum goes in one side, and out the other side comes a complete bicycle. Every component is original, versus supplied.
What newsrooms have been adept at, until recently, is manufacturing consent.
In goes the interests of government, advertisers, the political donor class, and ruling elites from the same social circles as media gatekeepers, and out comes consent from the newsroom and into Americans’ living rooms.
But it has all ground to a halt on former President Donald Trump’s elliptical and exaggerated comedic rhetoric — Trump doesn’t weave webs of lies, as portrayed by media talking heads. Instead, he formulates true things into wild or even absurd formulations, making them hyperreal. Surreal. Fact-checking Trump is like fact-checking a Salvador Dali painting.
Trump’s remarks in his debate with Kamala Harris about the influx of Haitian migrants to Springfield, Ohio, for instance, drove news cycles, and fact-checks, for weeks.
The simple and surreal formulation, “they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs,” proved a minefield for journalists. Officials, including Springfield’s mayor, denied that migrants had eaten pets and wildlife. Media unleashed a cavalcade of triumphant headlines declaring the story false, debunked, and a slur against migrants.
But it’s dangerous to spin, or heaven forbid, fact-check Trump’s spell-binding formulations, when he has already run away with a “true” narrative in the sense of that narrative being directionally correct.
Within days, 911 audio emerged of a Springfield resident alerting local police to migrants killing Canadian geese in a park, days before the debate. Photos and video emerged from nearby Dayton, 20 minutes away, of an unfortunate cat on a barbecue.
In other words, Trump was barking up the right tree.
So, too, with Trump’s remarks about Venezuelan gangs taking over apartment buildings in Aurora, Colo. In spite of the Aurora mayor’s denial, backed up by Colorado governor Jared Polis, a city councilwoman and the owner of an apartment complex stepped forward, devastating officials’ and the media’s narrative.
Now, we know apartments in San Antonio have fallen into South American gangs’ hands as well, and Cary, N.C., once the nation’s safest city, has now seen gang robberies.
Trump’s surrealism has driven the purveyors of the official narrative mad trying to keep up, while Trump himself is the one on the offensive. And, those with eyes to see a crumbling America, a shadow of what it was just a generation ago, are with him, no matter how surreal the formulation.
And it shows. Trump’s masterful capacity to match Americans’ everyday experiences of the apparent decline of their country with surreal formulations elevated him to the highest office in the land, and now Trump is on track to take the popular vote in addition to the electoral college.
Trump’s opponents can only deny what Americans’ eyes tell them—much like the Dali painting, Americans can see the clock, even if it’s folded in half and dripping wet, and they can tell what time it is.
TRUMP: "I want to be a whale psychiatrist."
— Dustin Grage (@GrageDustin) October 26, 2024
He’s going to win the popular vote. pic.twitter.com/7s8a0L4rNy
