Media Killed The Live Environment, or Trump’s Democratic Breakthrough
If you were to point out the defining cultural shift between, say, my grandfather’s generation and mine, it would be that media (of all types, from print to the internet) has gone from being mildly engaging and substantively controlled to being all-engaging and substantively uncontrolled.
By “controlled,” I’m talking about whether and to what extent any authority figure is able to control what messages are produced for mass audiences. In the 1970s, you had three network stations, a small set of executives who controlled them, and editorial guidance filtered down to a handful of Walter Cronkites, who would interpret the truth of the day’s events to the population. These folks had invested a lot into getting this kind of power, and had a lot to lose by misusing it. In 2017, any asshat with an internet connection can create an entire alternate media reality with all the apparent authority of the NY Times at no cost and transmit it worldwide. Without any burden or consequence associated with distributing media, when no one must earn a press pass or risk termination for printing an untruth, our narratives lose the objective value those costs impose.
By “engaging,” I’m talking about how much of our daily hours and attention we devote to spending within some form of media. This is perhaps the more meaningful shift. The relation of a few minutes with a daily paper and the majority of your time interacting with live environments has inverted. We spend the preponderance of our waking hours engaged with some sort of media – in media habitation, if you will. In consequence, one might expect us to value the quality of our media environment more than the quality of our live environment. That’s the fundamental shift I’m most concerned about.
The Trump presidency gets this. It’s staring us right in the face, but media has a hell of a time diagnosing its own impact on society.
The most revolutionary thing about the Trump presidency isn’t particularly about race, regressivism, or Russia. It is that he is an eminently anti-qualified candidate by all traditional metrics whether you’re left, right, or KKK, which is to say, he’s upended what qualifications actually matter. For the first time in our democracy’s history, we elected a man with no service to his country in government or the military. His business acumen is dubious at best. His expertise is in television. He does not particularly understand what the government is or does, and is not particularly interested in learning about it. Issue by issue, this is well-catalogued. He can’t articulate what Obamacare is or does; what Trumpcare is or does; or what health insurance itself is. He doesn’t understand the state of our immigration law, or, apparently, who it affects; the state of our border security; or what he’s proposing to do about either. He doesn’t understand the state of our trade agreements; what TPP is/was; what will come in its place. What he says on Monday doesn’t need to match what he says on Wednesday. He has turned simply shouting non-sequiturs into the foundations of a platform. And those are his pet issues. You could go on. He’s not even prepped enough to know not to admit to obstruction of justice on television. He gets caught time and again by hand-waving fact-checkers, like clockwork, and doesn’t care a whit. Unlike most candidates for the Presidency, he hasn’t tried to educate himself, and I’d wager he doesn’t know much more about the government now than when he declared himself a candidate. This also is unique – while the US has had a handful of daft Presidents, they’ve all been universally respectful of the office, humbled themselves to learn what they could about its functions, worked to become fluent on the issues they were championing. On the scale of competence in understanding and managing government functions, he’s not just the least qualified officeholder we’ve ever had, he’s uniquely repulsed by the concept. Saying he’s less qualified than the man on the street would be a wild understatement – his television-personality narcissism gives him the uniquely disqualifying capacity to disdain even trying to understand things he doesn’t intuitively grasp, and you’d have to assume better of the poor man on the street.
The reason he behaves this way is simple: his self-ascribed success as a President doesn’t have anything to do with changing anything particular in our live environment. It has to do with how he represents the office in our media environment. That is the unconscious, genius breakthrough he represents. He sees the office of the Presidency primarily as the most influential position in the media landscape, and interprets all of his mandate through that lens.
On any given day, it is natural to expect that he’s more likely to be found watching television, engaging with media, badgering entertainers, and managing his own media than he is negotiating a bill or an executive action. This is because he (rightly) sees the electoral base that won him the Presidency as more concerned with the quality of their media environment than with their live environment. That base is growing.
After working as hard as he could to pass a health bill that would disproportionately take health care away from his own voters, his approval rating is basically where it was on election day. And that’s because John Doe spends a precious little amount of his time going to doctors, and much more of it in media habitation, where any bill the President gets to sign becomes occasion for celebration, a ritual round of engaging fights between partisan reps, etc. This is the environment that matters to people.
This is Trump’s fundamental lesson for democracy: that what politicians do in the live environment is at least competitive with, if not wholly secondary to, how they manipulate the media environment. That these are related, but (if well-managed) can be functionally separate, independent systems. That the age of entertainment democracy isn’t a spasm. “Fighting for our country” is now a dualistic concept, where the live environment now must fight for priority with the media environment. And there’s every chance that second country asserts primacy over the first.
The end game of this system should be intuitive: an increasing priority on how we regulate our media environment. The growing attention to this issue is manifest in both parties. Everyone is concerned with how we weed out Fake News. The left has been itching to regulate Fox since 2000, the right is now itching to regulate CNN. The President has spent more energy tweeting about his concerns over media than any other substantive issue, and has floated substantive reforms. Trump TV now fucking exists.
Over the next generation, as the traditional subjects of media shrink in importance next to the medium itself, we may find ourselves increasingly living in and concerned with the shape of the mirror as over its subject. We have accepted that, in a free country, the mirror on society should be allowed to be bent, colored, festooned with glitter in the name of free speech. The more we live inside the mirror, though, the greater the stakes are for how we allow it to be manipulated. That’s a lesson for the left, right, and center: there’s now a winning electoral base that is more invested in the medium than the subject it is representing, and you have to reach them if you want to compete.
There are two ways a defeated center could respond: reform the media landscape, or master it.
On the reform side, consider: Newsrooms are shrinking, local news is dying out, legacy papers are on the wrong side of the advertising dollar. A wave of independent media support would be timely. The simplest solution might be to simply reinvest in public broadcasting, which has a long record of comparative quality and lags grossly behind other major countries. If it’s a private route, you might do well to come with a new business model, one that is not predicated on the slippery slope of grabbing as many wasted seconds of attention for your advertisers as possible. So subscription-based, but delivering a different product than newspapers. Netflix for news and analysis, maybe. In part, just aggregating the media arms of the major newspapers, but soon enough producing your own. How lonely is a guy like John Oliver out there in the world, producing his thirty minute analyses that the actual news media still isn’t trying to compete with because every second of air time is about grabbing random viewers rather than producing something of a quality that it might be viewed on demand for personal edification later. I’m not a media savant, but this is for illustrative purposes. Think outside the box and create what the marketplace is missing. Try to make it a smarter monster.
On the master-the-existing-marketplace side, consider: it’s becoming increasingly clear that we don’t have to play by any rules but holding your audience’s attention. Note to scientists. Note to economists. Note to public health experts. You want to win an election, you have to win a ratings war. Provocative narratives without any kind of factual support can work. I shouldn’t have to explain the end game. If it helps you sleep at night, you can pursue all the best evidence-based policy outcomes you want when you’re holding the keys.