Introduction: How We Got Here "I've never seen anything like this, and this [is] going to be a very good year for us," exclaimed executive chairman and CEO of CBS, Les Moonves, during a Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in San Francisco during the summer of 2016. "Sorry. It's a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going...It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS." Moonves was referring to the ratings his network garnered from Trump's sensationalistic behavior during the 2016 US presidential election. Moonves' CBS, as well as other networks were infatuated with the ratings gold mine that was Donald Trump. At one point, Trump's campaign reaped nearly three times the coverage of his Democratic Party rival Hillary Clinton and twenty-three times the coverage of the Bernie Sanders Campaign. Trump received the equivalent of $2 billion in free coverage from the corporate press. The disparity in coverage did not go unnoticed. A 2016 poll found that 75 percent of Americans agreed that Trump was covered too often. But after Trump won the electoral college vote, the media coverage would only increase. In the days that followed the 2016 presidential election, citing their unequal and trivial reporting, news outlets were chided for the election outcome. They tacitly admitted their failure to inform the public by changing their advertising and reporting; promising that they would recommit themselves to journalism. The New York Times penned a sheepish letter to readers, the Washington Post adopted the tagline "Democracy Dies in The Dark," and CNN used the banana fruit as a symbol of their dedication to fact driven reporting over political narratives. The promises made by the press signaled the overdue transformation of a profession that once served proudly as an essential pillar of democracy. So essential that political theorist Edmund Burke proclaimed the press as "more important than they all." Despite their promises to news consumers, any changes in corporate journalism after Trump's victory were either unnoticeable or ineffective at holding Trump accountable to voters. The Press and The President "Why does everything have to be so dramatic with this [President Donald Trump] administration? Is the government going to shut down? Are they going to get the tax bill? Are they going to get health care? What's going on here?" uttered Don Lemon during CNN's January 18, 2018 coverage of the approaching deadline for Congress to pass their annual budget to avoid a "shutdown of federal government spending and full operation." Lemon's comments were in response to Trump's Twitter silence in the hours prior to the "shutdown." Lemon's visible frustration over Trump's silence elucidated the corporate press' over dependence on Trump's tweets for broadcast content. Furthermore, it typified the blatant blindness of corporate media journalists to their role in fostering Trump's domination of most news cycles. As Lemon's broadcast continued, he and his guests blamed Trump for the drama and sensationalism surrounding the "shutdown," even though their industry acted as an accomplice by broadcasting and discussing seemingly every tweet from the White House. Rather than analyze the significance of the US government operating without an agreed upon budget, the corporate press presented the "shutdown" as an entertaining event. For example, like an episode of 24, a running "shutdown clock" appeared on CNN, keeping viewers on the edge of their seat to find out what would happen next.The clock eventually hit midnight, the world remained unchanged, and days later Congress passed a spending bill. The event was hardly worthy of a count-down let alone the dramatic coverage it garnered. The drama of the "shutdown," like so many other events, was attributed to Trump, but that only tells part of the story. The corporate press, by latching on to his every tweet as though they were breaking news, acted as an accomplice. In the days prior to the shutdown showdown, President Trump fed the corporate media's sensationalistic shutdown cacophony with a barrage of hyper-partisan tweets. For example, he tweeted "sadly, Democrats want to stop paying our troops and government workers in order to give a sweetheart deal, not a fair deal..." Lemon and his panel of experts analyzed and scrutinized the tweet; which in effect circulated the president's message to a wider audience. Using Twitter to tacitly shift debate and hoist blame upon the Democrats was a public relations maneuver Trump had nearly perfected by the start of his second year in office. The effective genius of this tactic was that it depended upon the corporate press to follow each digital message Trump distributed. In fact, Trump had transformed tweets from symbols of apolitical entertainment to corporate news fodder and effective political messaging. The United States Constitution provided a framework designed to have members of Congress visit their constituents, and then bring their concerns to the president in Washington, D.C. The advent of radio and television allowed the president to override Congress and convince the American people of what policies and positions they should demand of their representatives in government. Barrack Obama's campaign added a new dimension to political communications, relying on social media to further his reach and brand to voters. Trump, like Obama, also relied on social media, and in particular, Twitter, to disseminate his messages. But where Obama only used it to campaign, Trump used it govern. The effectiveness of Trump's tweets derived from the coverage they received by the corporate press. Their coverage turned his digital diarrhea into normalized political messaging that could draw ratings in the corporate press. For their business model, his tweets were crucial because they grabbed people's attention. In corporate entertainment, attention is gold. The more attention a program can draw from consumers, the more money advertisers are willing to pay to have their product featured during that program. Trump, like the attention hungry advertisers of the past and present, relied on controversial, offensive, and sensationalist messaging in his tweets because that is the type of content that reaps the most attention. The corporate press, hungry for advertising revenue, saw the value in these messages and took them from the Twitter-sphere to their programming. A year into his presidency, the corporate press, despite documenting thousands of his lies, still treated Trump and his tweets like a credible source of information. They analyzed and scrutinized nearly every tweet, in turn feeding hyper-partisan narratives and an entertainment culture, one that values fame, fortune, and consumption over integrity, substance, and thoughtful dialogue. As the clock approached midnight, the fateful moment when the shutdown became a reality, White House spokesperson Sara Huckabee Sanders released a statement that referred to the situation as the "Schumer Shutdown." The misguided titling alluded to US Senate minority leader of the Democratic Party, Chuck Schumer. The goal of this buffoonish branding was to blame the shutdown of the federal government budget on the Democratic Party who controlled none of the three branches of government. In their lengthy coverage of the Sanders' tweet, the corporate press legitimized the partisan debate over the budget by questioning if Sanders' tweet was accurate rather than simply stating its propagandistic purpose. Trump depended upon this hyper-partisanship coverage to consolidate his power. He blamed Democrats for every failure of reform from immigration to health care, even though his Republican Party controlled every arm of the federal government throughout his first two years in office. By uncritically covering such narratives, the corporate press helped erect and cultivate a culture of hyper-partisanship. The shutdown showdown lasted three days before Congress passed a short-term spending bill to keep the government operating. The analysis in the corporate press did not quell, but instead fanned the flames of partisanship. For example, the day the deal passed, CNN host Chris Cuomo opined about the political implications for the two, major corporate-backed parties rather than the nation as a whole when he asked aloud, if you "wipe away the noise from both sides about who won and who lost on this deal?" In the all too typical corporate press fashion, Cuomo was framing the topic in terms of partisan fallout rather than public interest. Meanwhile, other networks such as Fox News, peddled defenses of Trump comparing him to Lincoln and regurgitating his tweets in real time about the shutdown and the need for a wall along the US-Mexico border to be included in the budget. The poor corporate news coverage of the "shutdown" provided a small example of the reason so many Americans had lost faith in news media. By 2017, polls showed that by only 20 to 25percent of voters had faith in the US press. That is the lowest support for the press among US voters on record. Many of those disenchanted with the press took refuge on the Internet in social media networks and blogging communities where they could customize their news and views. The shift from "traditional" news media to digital content fragmented the news media landscape and people's perceptions of reality within it. With social media individuals can choose their friends and which bloggers or purported news outlets they want to follow. While seemingly innocuous, this insidiously allows them to block out stories and facts particularly if they disprove or undermine the digital content they consume. Increasingly, studies had found users' ability to customize their media consumption has led individuals to choose news stories that reinforce rather than those which offer facts that challenge or disprove individuals' views. As it turned out, the fragmented media silos were a vulnerability in the democratic system waiting for someone like Trump to exploit. This book argues that Trump developed an effective media strategy to consolidate his power. The media environment in which Trump (a reality TV celebrity) thrived was created after a national shift to neoliberal policies beginning in the 1970s that transformed the way institutions, especially news media and schools, functioned. These transformed institutions gave rise to four systematic vulnerabilities that Trump exploited to weaken the democratic process and consolidate his power: 1) a pervasive entertainment culture, 2) hyper-partisanship, 3) a fragmented media landscape, and 4) an ineffective education system. There are ways to ameliorate the influence of these four systematic vulnerabilities discussed in the fifth chapter. Four Systematic Vulnerabilities An erroneous assessment made by many in the electorate, including the so-called mainstream media (which is corporate), places Trump as the cause the current state of affairs in the US. However, Trump is a symptom of systemic problems in our educational and journalistic institutions that existed long before his campaign and remain visible today. Pervasive Entertainment Culture Trump exploited the centrality of America's pervasive entertainment culture in corporate news media. As will be discussed in the second chapter of this volume, a pervasive entertainment culture dominates US citizens and institutions. A pervasive entertainment culture spends the majority of its time focused on and following media spectacles. A spectacle, according to media scholar Guy Debord, is an inverted version of society where relations between people are replaced with relations between commodities. By the 1990s, the monopolization of news media outlets led to increased infotainment: entertainment packaged as news, and news packaged as entertainment. The entertainment coverage is a commodity that corporate media sell to the public. In the digital age, media consolidation and the advent of the Internet and handheld technologies have strengthened the cultural grip of the entertainment industry on the dominant culture. For example, characters played by entertainers and celebrities, such as B-movie actor Ronald Reagan and Trump on The Apprentice, leveraged their fame into politics. While Reagan went a more traditional route, rising through state and party ranks, Trump basically used his celebrity profile and social media, especially Twitter, to circumvent convention altogether, having no political experience at all. Trump, like Reagan, rode his celebrity status all the way to the White House. However, Trump methodically skipped right to the top, enabled by a captivated fourth estate he repeatedly attacked. As Trump's first year came to a close, there were signs that the nation had not shed its pervasive entertainment culture. Entertainers continued to fallaciously justify fame as a characteristic of one's ability to effectively govern. Examples include pro-wrestler Kane, reality television star and Dallas Mavericks' owner Mark Cuban, actress and comedian Roseanne Barr, reality television star and musician Clay Aiken, media proprietor Oprah Winfrey, and rock musician Kid Rock, among others seeking office. Hyper-Partisanship In addition to the exploitation of the pervasive entertainment culture, Trump exploited America's vulnerable dependence on hyper-partisan narratives. Partisanship is not about actual policy differences, it is about voters' proclivity for choosing a party member or proposed law over a particular policy or principled position. For example, 48 percent of Alabama voters chose a suspected child molester, Roy Moore, for the US Senate over Democrat Roy Jones presumably because the Republican party mattered more to these voters than what was previously seen as consensus position, opposing child molestation. In the decades leading to Trump's victory, partisanship had become a growing vulnerability. A 2014 Pew Research Study "Political Polarization in the American Public," revealed that "partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive" than ever before. Their survey of 10,000 people found that since the 1980s, liberals have been moving more left and conservatives more right. They found that "92percent of Republicans are to the right of the median Democrat, and 94percent of Democrats are to the left of the median Republican." A 2016 Stanford University study confirmed that the partisan divide deepened quickly in the mid-1990s. The study also found that since 1960, people believed members of the opposite party were similar in terms of intellect and selfishness. However, in 2008 that changed with nearly 20percent of both Democratic and Republican respondents disapproving of the other party. These studies demonstrate that in this so-called Trump era, facts and policy have become less meaningful to voters than their political party. As discussed in the third and fourth chapters of this volume, Trump exploited the partisan environment knowing that his statements, regardless of their validity, would be evaluated along partisan lines rather than their factual foundations. A 2018 study found when using social media like Facebook, that individuals judge a statement based on the partisan proclivity of the person it originated from, regardless of its validity. The study illuminated how politicians can garner support for a policy based on the party they affiliate with not the logic or facts behind that policy. As a result, a politician, like Trump, can consolidate power by using certain partisan language in policy statements regardless of its validity. Fragmented Media Landscape The hyper-partisanship of politics was complicated by the Internet. As discussed in Chapter Three of this volume, the Internet allows individuals to find, block, and customize their news, effectively constructing silos that confirm their reality. Search engines and social media customize the information users' view and receive to confirm rather than challenge their beliefs, reinforcing our already innate propensity for confirmation biases. The academic model of offering facts to undermine a position is moot when some of these silos are designed to help individuals disregard facts with which they might disagree. Scholars have remarked that this degree of confirmation bias, or motivated reasoning, has ushered in a "post-truth era." The term refers to an era where truth is debatable and facts are no longer seen as neutral, or even in existence. The Oxford Dictionary declared "post-truth" as the word of the year for 2016. Democracies depend upon truth to guide a majority of citizens to make rational decisions. The fragmenting of the media landscape created a vulnerability in the democratic system where individuals, regardless of political philosophy, view all news stories in opposition of their beliefs as "fake news." Examples of recent baseless claims held as "truths" in Internet silos include: Barack Obama is a radical Muslim operative, Hillary Clinton covered up a child sex ring, heathens waged a war on Christmas, American Idol was totally rigged, and the attacks of 9/11 were positively orchestrated and carried out with the knowledge and support of the federal government. The believers of these pervasive false claims were hungry for a politician to empower them by legitimizing their beliefs. In an effort to empower and expand his voter support base, Trump's political discourse exploited the fragmented media landscape. He accomplished this by legitimizing his supporters fabricated claims. For example, prior to announcing his run for the presidency, Trump built a base of supporters by touting the widespread, baseless claim, ubiquitously shared online, that Obama was not born in the US. His utterances of baseless Internet assertions gave him credibility with his supporters. This enabled him to falsify reality when politically convenient while maintaining the support of select Internet silos. For example, despite evidence to the contrary, with the support of Internet silos, he argued that the politically detrimental claims that he sexually assaulted women and colluded with Russia during his campaign were "fake news." This denouncement of the press, a staple of his campaign, was particularly effective because it fed into growing and widespread distaste for the press among his supporters. This is discussed further in chapters three and four of this volume. Ineffective Educational System It must be underscored, that an ineffective education system is partially responsible for the effectiveness of Trump's media strategy. The US education system was developed for an agricultural society moving into an industrial age. A century later, the US is the most mediated society in human history. It is highly influenced and dependent upon media. By the late 1990s, researchers were finding that average Americans spent twice as much time watching television as they did talking with family or spending time with their children. Most US citizens watched 70 days of television a year; 25 percent fell asleep to it and 40 percent watched television while eating. In 2015, Nielsen, a media statistics company, found that US citizens over the age of 18 consumed media 11 hours a day on average. This is sobering, considering that the average person is awake 16 to 18 hours a day. The dramatic transformation to a media saturated society was not accompanied by a related shift in education. If news media outlets cannot or will not provide the facts and analysis voters require for rational electoral decisions: it is up to the voters locate and identify fact-based reporting. However, US voters have not been taught the skills necessary to do so in a media saturated society. Most nations in Europe, Asia, and other parts of the world added media literacy education to their curriculum four decades ago. They, unlike the US, believed education should prepare students for the ubiquitous use of and dependency upon media. Ineffective education refers to a schooling system that sends students into a world that purports to operate democratically and depends upon media to function without the skills to navigate, evaluate, and equitably participate that society. This creates vulnerabilities that those in power or hungry for power can exploit. It is in this environment of pervasive entertainment culture, hyper-partisanship, a fragmented media, and ineffective education system that Trump thrived. Trump's Media Strategy The 2016 media landscape provided fertile ground for Trump's victory. His strategy hinged upon exploiting the decaying cultural and public institutions of education and media. In many respects, news media outlets acted as co-conspirators when the nation needed them to act as a pillar of democracy. One has to imagine that much of the impact of Trump's media strategy would be moot if the US had an effective education system that equipped voters with the skills to find, analyze, and fact check media content. Without such a system, Trump preyed upon voters tenuous critical thinking skills with hyper-partisanship dialogue to mobilize his agenda. To attain victory, Trump and his campaign team utilized carefully crafted media strategies that preyed upon the vulnerabilities of America's media saturated society in an effort to: Make Trump himself a spectacle; Denounce inconvenient facts as "fake news;" Legitimize falsehoods labeled as "alternative facts;" Over-saturate messaging via social media; Swerve the focus of the news media The goal of these efforts were to: maximize his media coverage; mitigate inconvenient facts; avoid scrutiny; reach his supporters; normalize his dystopian world view; Trump maximized excessive media coverage and normalized his views by making himself a spectacle through public feuds and sensational statements. He reached his supporters by disregarding inconvenient facts with the label "fake news" and propagating self-serving falsehoods as "alternative facts." Trump's media methodology for avoiding scrutiny relied on offering a barrage of conflicting messages that confuse reporters and citizens and allow space for him to swerve the focus of the corporate press from criticizing him to an unrelated news story. His media methodology was successful because the US was a polarized entertainment culture fragmented in its media consumption, and ill equipped by its educational institutions to support a 21st century media saturated democracy. For Whom is this Book Written? This book is written for everyone who cares about democracy. It argues that Trump is more a symptom rather than the cause of the contemporary problems in America's media saturated society. His campaign adroitly read the contemporary political landscape and exploited vulnerabilities in the system that began to take form at least a half a century earlier. He preyed upon those weaknesses to attain victory. This book is not only a warning about the consequences of the ongoing collapse of public institutions in US society, which will lead to more Trumps if not addressed, but is also a call to action. That said, it should be stated that this book is not about Trump per se, nor the shortcomings of the Clinton campaign, nor about election fraud and gerrymandering, nor the electoral college, supposed spoilers, or Russiagate theories and conspiracies, though other books certainly should and are being written about these topics. Our interest hones in on understanding how elite manipulation of vulnerabilities in public institutions like education and the free press have played in our current situation and what can be done to change direction towards a more independent, inclusive, and reason-based civic dialogue and culture. The final chapter highlights the work of scholars and activists offering strategies and resources not only for responding to contemporary challenges, but for constructing new and improved public institutions to create a more representative republic. One that poll after poll finds that a majority of Americans want what Trump, much of the GOP, and even leading Democrats do not- including universal health care, Dreamers to remain in the US, action to be taken on the climate crisis by directly limiting carbon emissions, inclusion of third parties in elections, stricter gun laws, tuition free college, and yes, legalized pot. In other words: Got democracy? The first chapter of this book examines how a shift to neoliberalism in the US gave rise to the four systematic vulnerabilities that contributed to Trump's political success: Entertainment Culture, Partisanship, Fragmented Media Silos, and Ineffective Education System. To understand Trump's media methodology and its effectiveness, it is essential to understand the current condition and ineffectiveness of US institutions. The chapter examines how the post-1960s embrace of neoliberalism in the US, and the marginalization and demonization of the free press, exploited weaknesses in traditional models of investigative journalism that led to the supremacy of for-profit, partisan corporate media giants. These media giants cater to a confirmation biased target audience as well as blurred lines of news/opinion, information, and entertainment. The media funding models impacted their coverage- or lack thereof- regarding certain issues, stories, and topics. In addition, the chapter analyzes how the shift to neoliberalism came at the expense of an effective education system. In fact, right as the US became the most media saturated democracy in history, the US education system removed civics and media literacy content in favor of a more market driven curriculum. Chapter two is the first of three chapters that summarize and analyze Trump's media strategy. It outlines how Trump maximized his media coverage by exploiting the pervasive entertainment culture. Trump successfully maximized coverage by making himself a spectacle of entertainment culture that the corporate press could not avoid covering. His campaign and presidency exploited the corporate news media's overreliance on entertainment culture to further his political ambitions. Trump altered the long-held dependency of the press and politicians from a mutually beneficial relationship that strengthens democracy to a bargain-based arrangement that offered advertising profits in exchange for limitless coverage. The chapter examines how contemporary journalism education and the for-profit model of corporate media result in media outlets covering newsworthy stories in a non-newsworthy manner. The result is that critical events in US History are trivialized and misrepresented, which in turn alters public opinion undermining the health of the US democratic system. The third chapter expounds Trump's media strategy for marginalizing and mitigating facts that undermined his policies and perspectives. He exploited America's tenuous grasp on truth by supporting policies and perspectives whose purpose and necessity were not grounded in facts. Rather than create policies based on facts, Trump created facts to justify policy. He fabricated news stories or relied on the baseless claims of the alt-right silos of reality to justify policy and perspectives. He weaponized the terms "fake news" and "alternative facts" to centralize his power and maintain a war for truth between the press and himself. The chapter analyzes how the corporate media's ineptitude in holding Trump accountable to the American people allowed his strategy to flourish. The federal investigation into the potential collusion of the Russian Government and the Trump campaign and subsequent administration is used as a case study to examine Trump's methodology in the chapter. The fourth chapter examines Trump's media strategy for avoiding scrutiny. The chapter argues that the Trump Administration preyed upon the corporate press' journalistic methodology to maintain their political base and denounce their critics. The Trump Administration's strategy for avoiding scrutiny was to broadcast multiple, but conflicting messages via press briefings, Tweets, and public statements to confuse journalists looking for objectivity while angering political opponents, silencing critics, and strengthening supporters. The chapter uses two case studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of Trump's media methodology for avoiding scrutiny: the 2017 events in Charlottesville Virginia and the 2017 Niger Ambush. In both cases, Trump spun the media by bombarding them with multiple policy initiatives and positions, sometimes in conflict with one another. The result was that the press was unable to fully examine, question, or understand a particular policy or position. Instead, they acted as a megaphone spreading the president's message without useful analysis. The fifth and final chapter offers a proposed vision for combatting the societal problems described in the book. The chapter will rely upon methods and strategies for repairing and rebuilding the broken media and educational systems in the US using the work of activist organizations such as Project Censored, ACME: Action Coalition for Media Education, the Global Critical Media Literacy Project, the Union of Democratic Communication (UDC), Tribeworthy, as well as the work of scholars such as Angela Davis, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Bill McKibbon, Sarah van Gelder, Ralph Nader, Robert McChesney, Sut Jhally, Mark and Paul Engler, and Chris Crass among others. The conclusion of this book suggests specific changes to education in the US through a critical media literacy education that values civic engagement, student empowerment, increased social justice attitudes, a critical awareness of media, and student engagement both in and out of the classroom. Conclusion Trump's election was a symptom of a nation in decay. His media strategy was successful in winning the presidency due in large part to the complicity and ineptitude of the corporate press. He exploited vulnerabilities in the most mediated society in world history through sensationalized spectacles that fed the media's insatiable appetite for entertainment. He targeted messaging to silos of hyper-reality on the Internet's fragmented news media and disseminated falsehoods that contributed to pronounced partisanship while distracting from other important events and troubling facts. This book is about all of that, as well as what we can do about it. It is not only a warning about the societal vulnerabilities in the US, which will lead to more Trumps if not addressed, but it is also a call to action about how we can restore sanity and integrity to civic life. Excerpted from United States of Distraction: Media Manipulation in Post-Truth America (and What We Can Do about It) by Mickey Huff, Nolan Higdon All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
