Everyone loves a clown

 

Cartoon by Gou Ben; Poem by Long Yuan

 

No longer respectable,
Media has devolved into a trash receptacle,
A fitting venue for Trump’s trashy spectacle.
The Internet is dominated by click-bait,
Allowing falsehoods to easily proliferate.
Seizing on distaste for P.C. culture,
Trump swoops in like a ravenous vulture.
The media shows its complicity
By giving the reality star free publicity.
While he may have the capacity to entertain,
Performing and leading are not the same.
It’s true that everyone loves a clown,
But you don’t make the village idiot
The mayor of the town.

---

 

The curious phenomenon of Donald Trump has spawned an endless series of think pieces exploring how a real estate magnate and former reality TV star with no political experience could possibly be a viable candidate for the highest office in the world’s most powerful country.
 

These articles will invariably reference Trump’s status as a political outsider at a time when faith in establishment politics and institutions is miserably low. Others argue that Trump represents a repudiation of political correctness or that his tough talk appeals to an American public caught in the grip of a culture of fear.
 

While all of these factors have certainly contributed to Trump’s popularity among certain segments of the population, they are shaped and amplified by the seismic shifts that have occurred in the American media landscape in the past decade or so. Print media—and with it the fine traditions of in-depth, watchdog reporting and a religious belief in accuracy—is tragically marching toward the dustbin of history.

The Fourth Estate is crumbling and rising in its place is a loose patchwork of cable news infotainment, Internet click-bait and the superficial armchair punditry of the blogosphere. America’s once-vaunted “marketplace of ideas” has degenerated into a flea market, and the exquisitely crafted investigative news of journalism’s glory days has been supplanted by hobbled-together bric-a-brac and counterfeits.

And onto this stage steps Trump, a political animal ill equipped to survive in a world where facts matter. But, as a former reality show host, he is uniquely adapted to a media environment in which Kim Kardashian’s posterior can “break the Internet” while the massacre of nearly 100 civilians in Nigeria at the hands of Boko Haram hardly merits a passing mention.

The decline of print journalism and its replacement by cable and digital news has drastic implications for how the public consumes media. Traditional print media is conducive to the thoughtful exploration of critical issues, but cable and other forms of broadcast news have to be condensed, allowing for fewer stories within a given news cycle. In order to stay competitive, broadcast media tend to favor the stories that sell the best, i.e. those that people find most entertaining or interesting, though entertainment value is only one component of newsworthiness and arguably the least important.
 

Similarly, digital stories that are designed to attract clicks favor overly simplistic interpretations of events that fit neatly into an attention-grabbing headline. It should come as no surprise that a candidate like Trump, who shuns nuance and speaks in colorful, entertaining sound bites, would benefit from this state of affairs as opposed to more traditional politicians, who only bore the public with such trivial matters as policy and practical solutions to national problems.
 

Drawing on what passes for “charisma” these days in the United States, Trump is able to achieve maximum coverage with minimum investment. Based on data reported by media research firm mediaQuant, the New York Times reported that his campaign has spent only $10 million for paid advertisements but has received the dollar equivalent of $1.8 billion in “earned media,” free advertising from commentaries across various platforms, including social media.

An optimistic person would find hope in the fact some websites, like PolitiFact, FAIR and Media Matters, are upholding print media’s reverence for factual accuracy and accountability.
 

But even if there were an army of fact-checkers, attempts to show his claims are false could only strengthen the beliefs of his supporters. In an interview with Slate, political scientist Brendan Nyhan referred to this as the “backfire effect.” His supporters remained faithful even after PolitiFact found that 76 percent of his claims were false and dubbed his entire campaign “The 2015 Lie of the Year.”
 

Part of this is due to the distrust Trump supporters have for establishment institutions, particularly the mainstream media, which the Republican Party has spent at least a decade demonizing. They look instead to alternative sources, such as blogs and news websites, which are generally far more unreliable.

The role new media plays as a catalyst for the spread of false or misleading information was the focus of journalist and media scholar Craig Silverman’s report “Lies, Damned Lies and Viral Content: How Websites Spread (and Debunk) Online Rumors, Claims and Misinformation.” In it, Silverman argues that in the rush to put out content, news websites often put very little or no effort into verifying the information they publish, which is often just passed on uncritically from another website with little added value.
 

Silverman wrote: “Within minutes or hours a claim can morph from a lone tweet or badly sourced report to a story repeated by dozens of news websites, generating tens of thousands of shares. Once a certain critical mass is met, repetition has a powerful effect on belief. The rumor becomes true for readers simply by virtue of its ubiquity.”
 

Myth-busting website snopes.com had to debunk a story from the satirical paper The Onion, illustrating what can happen when society lacks professionals to help the public discern fact from fiction.
 

The Onion had reported that Cubans were clinging to the back of President Obama’s plane as it left the country. The article was circulated around the Internet as a genuine news report complete with an obviously fake picture of people huddled on the plane’s wings and gripping its landing gear mid-flight. Sadly, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened.
 

While Trump’s outlandish buffoonery may provide fodder for late night talk show hosts and his antics keep the ratings high at purveyors of infotainment like Fox News and CNN, his message of hate and divisiveness has real and dangerous consequences.
 

Last December, researchers at California State University in San Bernardino found that attacks against Muslims and mosques have tripled since the attacks in Paris, driven in part by anti-Muslim sentiment that conservative politicians like Trump and Ted Cruz exploit for political gain. That same month, William Celli, a Trump supporter, was arrested for possession of homemade explosives, which he intended to use to bomb a mosque.
 

The effects of Trump’s message and the complicity of the US media in delivering it are apparent. One case that comes to mind is the reporting on Trump’s proposal for a moratorium on Muslims entering the country, which cited a survey from a “think tank” that claimed one-quarter of US Muslims support sharia law and violent jihad against the West. Much of the initial reportage identified the survey’s source as the credible-sounding Center for Security Policy without any perspective on obvious agenda of the organization that published it.
 

Later reporting by Factcheck.org, PolitiFact and the Washington Post called into question the organization that produced it as well as its methodology and the presentation of its findings.

Despite its name, which conveys a tone of dispassionate scholarship, the Center for Security Policy has been labeled an extremist organization by the Southern Policy Law Center, and its director Frank Gaffney has a reputation on the left and the right as a crank.
 

The center used an online opt-in survey to get responses from 600 Muslims, but Christopher Hull, a former Georgetown professor who now works for the center, admitted that this type of survey cannot be extrapolated to the entire population.
 

Unfortunately, Trump’s distortion had already produced its intended effect. Any attempts to dispel the notion that one-in-four Muslims want to murder Americans and implement Sharia law would only have the effect of reinforcing that belief among those who had already made up their minds that it was true long before they had anything resembling credible evidence.
 

The greatest irony of Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” is that his campaign has made a farce of American democracy and one of its most hallowed institutions: the press.

 

Justin Ward is a reporter at the Chinese Social Sciences Today.