The Breaking News: Trump Tweeted

By Bob Travica

Donald Trump will move to the American Presidential office in January 2017. In my public speeches during 2016, I forecasted this outcome. My reasons were quite simple: (1) American voters really care just about their pocketbook, (2) Poking the American dream can add some weight, and (3) The contender, Hillary Clinton, was a too weak candidate.

I won’t discuss in detail each reason, but just want to warn various pundits to never underestimate the first reason. It overshadows everything else, including the foreign policy (of which the typical voter has no clue), and transgressions of ethics, such as dirty language, lies and manipulations (which pack the world of entertainment, media, politics and business, anyway), and the like “issues.” Trump put all his trumps behind the first reason.

Mrs. Clinton underperformed on reason 1, totally neglected reason 2, and focused on these marginal things. Add to this her unsatisfactory performance as the Secretary of State in the Obama government (which has got her fired) and her long tenure in politics (which today is a liability in the eyes of the apathetic American voter). This explains reason 3.

The media and pollsters didn’t see Trump’s win in elections coming. This failure speaks volumes of a superficiality characterizing the media’s approach to elections. In the case of TV, the approach was a blend of empiricism and secondary analysis. There was too much focusing on polling (which lacked validity) and on daily occurrences in the worlds of politics and media. As if the American society is a reality show spun unpredictably by random actions of the actors. As if the shrinking of the middle class has not become endemic. As if the Occupy movement and the mass outrage against the one percent of the wealthiest has never happened. As if the rusting of the once prosperous industrial zones has not pushed a massive workforce out and into marginal, low-paid jobs. As if the American society is not deeply divided also on the political and ethno/racial basis. Still, the spinners of the mass reality show were hoping that the people would care more about a private, harassing babbling of the former reality host turned Presidential candidate than any of these things. How narrow-minded!

The failure of media to predict Trump’s win could be seen in the other light too. More precisely, one could wonder about the media’s dogmatic insistence that Trump was not a serious candidate and, therefore, was incapable of winning. The closer the election was, the more some media dropped Trump from their radar screen and assumed that Clinton’s win was a done deal. One may wonder, why did the media behave this way? Was this part of supporting the Clinton camp? The diligence and ferocity with which the media trampled Trump could lead to such a hypothesis. But testing it would involve unveiling the ties between the implicated media and Democratic Party, along with its corporate interest backing.

The major American media openly dislike Trump and don’t hesitate to show it. They didn’t spare ammunition while covering Trump’s outrageous campaigning moves calculated to entertain and shock. (For more on Trump’s manipulation of old and new media see my previous blog.) The immediate post-election coverage consists of Anti-Trump street protests, criticizing Trump for “softening” on extreme campaign promises (the same ones the media criticized during the campaign), suspecting Trump’s choices of officials, more criticism of Trump as for connecting to the public personalities he criticized during the campaign (while media “wish” that he “brings the nation together”).

In this interim period between Trump's mansions and the White House, the old media also punch Trump for being “lenient” toward Russia’s President who “influenced” American Presidential elections via Wiki Leaks. Overwhelmed with a patriotic zeal, the media ignore totally some really important questions, such as how could this happen, if it did? Who is responsible? Did Wiki Leaks really influence the voters? How many? All in all, the old media are just continuing to demonstrate their misreading of the business mogul/entertainer turned the President-Elect. Media cannot fathom the lesson Trump keeps broadcasting about the twisted character of media-ted politics.

Old media’s hate of Trump is deeply rooted and may be traced down to a basic instinct of survival. For the starters, Trump uses a hefty part of the media time and space without paying for it. During the campaign, the media tracked each step of his and amplified it through a prolonged rambling, a.k.a. “analysis”. Media couldn’t do anything but suck it, since Trump was delivering the media’s manna – scandals. Of course, a scandalous coverage increased the program ratings and brought more of the advertising money to media. That’s actually why they had to cover Trump before he became the President-Elect.

Second, Trump additionally undercuts the media’s revenues by choosing to bypass them. As a passionate tweetee (a Tweeter user), and not shy of other new media either, Trump proves that he needs not TV and newspapers as loudspeakers for his statements. The media keep losing a precious connection power, based on the privileges of special access to informing sources, gate-keeping and content filtering. The bell tolls for an era in old media’s historical trajectory. Now, the breaking news on CNN is not “Mr. Trump stated for our program…”, but rather “Trump tweeted…” The old media must cover new media which are totally out of their control. An inescapable move that, on the long run, is as clumsy as shooting one’s own foot.

Third, old media hate Trump because he equals them in spin-doctoring skills. Mastering impression management, keeping the audience on tiptoes, creating an endless reality circus… Trump does all this as effectively as the old media do. He steals the daily bread from the media’s hands, and so in a professional sense. Increasingly confused, the old media must cover an unorthodox public figure even when he drags them into his fairy tallish mansions and babble-Tweets the first thing he’s got on mind.

All in all, Trump Tasers the old media into the heart. But he doesn’t intend to kill them, just to put them in a different place than the media have been used to. Is this a real politician and real politics? But wait, who’s ever said that the mediated politicians and politics must be real? Politicians show their real face and do real politics just on the backstage, invisible to the mass audience. The old media have for long been an accomplice in this cover-up. Trump tears up the curtain by turning the public political play into a grotesque.  

The intrusion of new media into big politics may have as profound effects as the political insertion of radio and TV had in their times. Is this a change for better, looking from the perspective of democracy? Not necessarily. New media are as prone to manipulation as old media, except that the former is clear about it while the latter pretends the (journalistic) truth. Trump could easily start his own TV, radio, an old media empire. But that would mean falling back to the mediated politics orthodoxy. If nothing else comes out of Trump’s trumping or - if you will - trumpery, it is the realization that the model of parliamentary democracy, which is based on alienated parties and accompanying old media, has worn out. 

Social Media in Politics: Crowd Acting vs. InstaSnap Spinning

Social media (SM) have entered the world of politics with recent significant political developments. Instances of SM are Facebook, Tweeter, topically-focused Websites, Websites for sharing digital artifacts (YouTube, Instagram), Rich Site Summaries, and social bookmarking sites. Contrasted to old media of TV, press, radio and film, SM can be seen as new media. In politics, new media can do the same things that old media do. But they can do more. Still, what appears a new thing, sometimes can be just the disguised old.

Something New: Crowd Acting

When a political activist tweets, he/she engages in broadcasting, thus replicating radio. When the group with a political agenda posts text and videos on a Facebook, they do what TV has always been doing in political processes. But the difference is that anyone can use Twitter and Facebook to create messages and reach out to a select group or (theoretically) to any of 320 million people on Twitter or 1.6 billion on Facebook. And these other users can talk back to the original sender. These communication and connectivity capabilities are apparently broader than those of radio and TV. Old media are controlled by professionals and special interest working behind them, such as governments, political parties, corporations, think tanks, organized crime, and public relations agencies. Therefore, SM partly replicate old media, while doing something more, expanding capabilities of old media. And this is not all.

Since 2010, Facebook, Tweeter and other SM have been deployed for self-organizing in political developments that resulted in toppling governments and dismantling functional nation-states throughout the Middle East (so called “Arab Spring”). SM also played a role in self-organizing of protesters against the police brutality in the United States during 2015. SM have been involved in the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe, being deployed on all sides – by pro-refugee forces, by their opponents, and by the refugees themselves. It is the nature of SM’s Internet-centric technologies, which couples with mobile technologies (cell phones, Wi-Fi devices), that enables a rapid deployment, self-initiated communication, and emergence of political activism within the crowd and by the crowd.

SM have undoubtedly facilitated entering of the masses into big politics. Internet-bound vocabulary labels these with “crowd” (as in crowd-sourcing, crowd-wisdom, and crowd funding). SM relate to “crowd” where the old media reference the “audience”. Although lacking a high-brow connotation of “audience”, the term “crowd” rejects the passive role of media message receiver and allows for broadening of the actor role (even though somewhat ambiguous).

Something Old Appearing New: InstaSnap Politics

As SM are open media, the crowd has no exclusive hold over it. A political leader owning a Facebook page has “friends” who absorb the content pushed onto them. The leader-mass relationship is also reestablished on Twitter via the division between Twittees and “followers”. Contenders to the President’s Office in the U.S. have millions of Tweeter followers (Donald Trump 8 million, Bernie Sanders 2 million). Barack Obama, the sitting President who started the SM game, has as much as 76 million followers. The number of followers became a measure of political rating in American politics to the extent that some politicians feel compelled to fabricate the figure (Hillary Clinton, also a contender for the throne in Washington, has been suspected of such a practice).

Politicians can, therefore, manipulate SM for promoting their own interest. In this respect, SM are not immune of the spin doctoring that appears pertinent to media in general. Old media have established such a role resolutely with little variation across types of political systems. The press, for example, in multi-party systems divides its allegiance between main political parties. Ownership interest and advertising concerns additionally bound editorial policies. In single-party systems or dictatorships, the press is on even a shorter leash. As for the radio, it has served as a loudspeaker of massive propagandistic meetings and other events to intrude into private homes. This role was diminished with the end of great dictators’ era. The propagandistic role gave way to debates and interviews in which brain washing is less direct. The rest of radio programming is entertainment mechanically appended to political programming.

TV turned political events into a total visual show, expanding over the radio’s audio-boundedness. Whether TV spectacles take form of reports, debates, election races, or unscheduled boxing matches between agitated parliamentarians, TV is after reality construction by occupying the audience’s cognition. The excitement arousing content and emotional appeal are brought to the fore – threat, fight, success, disaster, comedy, tragedy, fear, hope, envy, admiration, craving… The Greek drama and Roman circus blended into televised reality. The rational content is irrelevant – emotional effects count. Like radio, TV ends up with entertainment, but spin doctoring is smoothly blended in it. Donald Trump is a good example for this.

The businessman-turned-politician and aspiring U.S. President, Trump deliberately pushes TV into the domain of entertainment. Trump uses his experience from the successful reality show Apprentice, in which he featured in a role of himself (sort of). As part of his ongoing campaign “Make America Great Again!” Trump appears often on TV screens. Following a bossy style of a business owner from the Apprentice, he piles up a petty talk, pokes and punches his opponents and does everything that has little to do with political issues. In effect, Trump creates a role of the nation’s big daddy in an emerging TV soap titled “American Presidential Elections”. TV actively helps since Trump’s trumping is the way of creating sensationalistic content that makes TV’s manna. As a joint effect, by pushing the medium’s engagement in politics to a grotesque, Mr. Trump confirms that TV is to entertain the political audience as the gladiator arena did in the Roman circus, while real politics remains invisible.

The Trump campaign heavily utilizes SM in the same sensational roller-coaster manner. This may be eye-opening to those who view SM solely as the means of people-power. Trump’s Website, of course, is all biased in support to his owner. What is more intriguing, the site’s front page features links to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube – four power houses of SM. The content of these SM parallels that on TV: self-advertising, petty attacks on the opponents, and blank promises on America’s prospective greatness under Trump’s leadership. No true substance. Vox populi is aired as a normal component of SM, but the crowd wisdom boils down to thumb-up, thumb-down reactions to Trump’s provocations. Again no substance; an exception are posts by Mexicans venting anger at Trump’s idea of enlarging the wall on the American-Mexican border.

Trump’s use of SM proves that new media can serve as the means of mass manipulation by special interest. Thus, SM replicate old media. But they even expand the manipulation capacity as spinning is more direct, cheaper, and potentially more mesmerizing due to special properties of SM. These bring up playfulness, speed, randomness, virulence, excitement, and shocking capability via a multi-format content. For instance, Instagram enables creating and sending visual messages on the spot. Communication and photo/video sharing is virulently fast. The content is also discrete rather than story-like, allowing user to arbitrarily plug in and plug out. These easing effects clean up a space for play, surprise, and excitement, and may attract even the folks uninterested in politics.

Snapchat mimics Instagram, but with temporary messages that erase themselves after a while. By boasting randomness and a shocking capacity, Snapchat infuses thriller-like excitement into the reality show of political campaigning. For the fear of missing a snap and thus falling out of the loop, the crowd members must be on a continuous lookout. The umbilical digital cord is reinforced, and a Trumpian InstaSnap politics enters a harvesting season.

It remains to be seen whether SM will end up by replicating and extending the manipulative character of old media, or perhaps substitute these by empowering crowd-driven politics? (As for Mr. Trump, SM are firing some funny bullets.