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TRUMP’S
MEDIA
WAR
Edited by
Catherine Happer, Andrew Hoskins and William Merrin
Trump’s Media War
Catherine Happer • Andrew Hoskins
William Merrin
Editors
William Merrin
Swansea University
Swansea, UK
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Preface
v
vi PREFACE
References
Danner, Mark. 2017. What He Could Do. The New York Review of Books. 23 March.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/03/23/what-trump-could-do/
Happer, Catherine, and Hoskins, Andrew. Forthcoming. Broken Media: The Post-
Trust Crisis of the Mainstream.
Nagle, Angela. 2017. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and
Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-right. Alresford: Zero Books.
PREFACE vii
Pope, Kyle. 2018. It’s time to rethink how we cover Trump. Columbia Journalism
Review. 22 January. https://www.cjr.org/covering_trump/trump-coverage-
inauguration-press-media.php
Waldman, Katy. 2018. There’s Nothing More to Learn About Trump. Please
enjoy this essay about him. Slate. 22 January. https://slate.com/news-and-
politics/2018/01/theres-nothing-more-to-learn-about-trump-please-enjoy-
this-essay-about-him.html
Contents
ix
x Contents
Index 257
Notes on Contributors
xiii
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
His latest book is Forging the World: Strategic Narratives and International
Relations (2017). He was Specialist Advisor to the UK Parliament’s Select
Committee on Soft Power, producing the report Power and Persuasion in
the Modern World. He is about to complete a book on narrative diplomacy
and the 2015 Iran peace deal.
Dounia Mahlouly is a research associate at the International Centre for
the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR), King’s College London, as part of the
VOX-Pol Network of Excellence. She holds a PhD from the University of
Glasgow. Her thesis investigates the role of social media campaigning
in the constitutional and presidential debates in post-revolutionary
Tunisia and Egypt. It discusses the process through which different
political groups incorporated participative media as part of their
campaigning strategy and assesses to what extent such tools might
contribute to consolidate a sustainable ideological message.
William Merrin is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Swansea
University. His research and teaching focus on media and cultural theory,
contemporary developments in digital media, and the history and philoso-
phy of technology. Merrin developed the concept of ‘Media Studies 2.0’,
starting the blog of the same name in November 2006 to follow
developments in digital media and critically reflect upon the state and
future of media studies. His books include Media Studies 2.0 (2015)
and Digital War: A Critical Introduction (2018).
Jennifer Pybus is Lecturer in Digital Culture and Society in the
Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. Her research
looks at the politics of datafication and everyday life, specifically in relation
to those critical points of tension that lie at the intersections between digi-
tal culture, Big Data and emerging advertising and marketing practices.
This includes research around youth and privacy which relates to how
third party ecosystems found on social media platforms are transforming
the advertising industry via the rise of data analytics and algorithmic
processes.
Alex Symons is Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies
at LIM College, New York. His publications include Mel Brooks in the
Cultural Industries (2012), as well as articles in Celebrity Studies, the
Journal of Popular Film and Television, and the Journal of Adaptation in
Film and Performance. His most recent work examines social media and
podcasting in the careers of Doug Stanhope, Louis CK, and Marc Maron.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii
When the world woke on 9 November 2016 to find Donald Trump had
won the US presidential election, it was like a break in mainstream, con-
sensual reality. This topped even Back to the Future’s joke, when Doc
Brown asked Marty, ‘Then tell me future-boy, who’s president of the
United States in 1985?’ and his incredulity at being told it was Ronald
Reagan, the actor—‘Then who’s Vice-President? Jerry Lewis?’ Reagan, at
least, had a political career. Trump was a celebrity-businessman, cameo
film-actor, member of the WWE Hall of Fame and reality-TV host who
had never held any public office.
Sweeping aside the conventions of professional political polish and pre-
sentation, Trump blustered, bluffed, fluffed, and incoherently shouted,
threatened and tweeted his way to the presidency, surviving—and even
gaining in strength from—character flaws and failures that would have tor-
pedoed a normal campaign. Now he’d defeated probably the best-qualified
presidential candidate in living memory. In the aftermath of his election,
reality itself seemed broken. The fourth wall of the television screen had
been smashed and the public had ‘hired’ the boss of The Apprentice.
But Trump wasn’t just a sign of a broken reality; he was the beneficiary
of it. Mainstream consensual reality had shattered a long time ago; it was
just that shattering hadn’t gone mainstream. Trump was the moment
when that alt-reality seized the political stage. His success was the result of
a violent abreaction, an outpouring and release of dispossessed discontent
that had one credo: continually articulating itself against the establish-
ment, the elite, the mainstream, the political order, the neo-liberal eco-
nomic order, the global order, the established way of doing things—against,
that is, the entirety of the hitherto existing mainstream reality. Much of
this discontent was justified, such as the pain of the economically margin-
alized Rust Belt workers, and there were many good reasons to vote for an
outsider against Hilary Clinton’s more-of-the-same neo-liberal centrism.
But much of the discontent had a more dubious origin and cause, such as
the ‘Whitelash’ of left-behind, angry white males, lamenting the multicul-
tural PC-world where they thought only black lives now mattered and
taking revenge on eight years of a black presidency.
There was, if you looked into it, a world of these claims, entire world-
views disconnected from what appeared in the mainstream media, in an
inter-linked, pick-and-mix online ecology of information, opinions, facts,
narratives, and claims. Trying to decipher the world-view of these Trump
voters, the press soon found their scapegoat. It was precisely this unreality
that was responsible: it was ‘fake news’ that had won Trump the election.
It was a convenient explanation too, allowing the mainstream media to
direct blame at the internet—that upstart threat to their eyeballs and
advertising revenue—and especially at the apparent cause of all this fake
news, social media.
Within days, Facebook was getting the blame. Most people today get
their news from Facebook, the argument went, hence their susceptibility
to any and every story appearing in their feed. Fake stories, pushed into its
ecology for political reasons, gathered attention and garnered shares and
‘likes’, projecting them virally through the network, spreading lies through
social media and, therefore, through the heart of the social itself. By 11
November, Zuckerberg was on the defensive, telling a Californian tech-
nology conference, ‘The idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very
small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way I think is
a pretty crazy idea…Voters make decisions based on their lived experi-
ence’.1 Zuckerberg criticized the media’s interpretation of the result,
WEAPONIZING REALITY: AN INTRODUCTION TO TRUMP’S WAR… 5
While we don’t write the news stories you read and share, we also recognize
we’re more than just a distributor of news. We’re a new kind of platform for
public discourse – and that means we have a new kind of responsibility to
enable people to have the most meaningful conversations, and to build a
space where people can be informed.10
Facebook was ‘a new kind of platform for public discourse’, with ‘a new
kind of responsibility’.11 It made for a bad end-of-year for the previously
unassailable and reverentially treated social media giant.
Of course, the outrage at Facebook and the technology companies was
most vociferously expressed in the traditional news organizations, espe-
cially in newspapers. The mainstream press hadn’t simply lost the fight
with the internet—accepting declining print sales and developing online
sites where they mostly gave their work away for free—more importantly,
they had lost control of people’s attention and interest to social media.
There was a deep resentment within journalism that their profession didn’t
matter as much now. Their entire livelihood was built on a technological
system and in an age in which only a select few could broadcast their opin-
ions to the masses. Now, anyone could, and we were more interested in
our friends’ opinions—or, if we were honest, our own opinions—than those
WEAPONIZING REALITY: AN INTRODUCTION TO TRUMP’S WAR… 7
That address on the bottom of this column? That is the pathetic, confused
death knell of the once-proud newspaper industry, and I want nothing to do
with it. Sending an email to that address is about as useful as sending your
study group report about Iraq to the president.
Here’s what my internet-fearing editors have failed to understand: I
don’t want to talk to you; I want to talk at you. A column is not my attempt
to engage in a conversation with you. I have more than enough people to
converse with. And I don’t listen to them either.12
‘I get that you have opinions you want to share’, he says. ‘I just don’t have
any interest in them’.13 The Web 2.0 world, therefore, had turned every-
one into a writer and publisher. It was true that few said much worth read-
ing, but it was important to them and their friends and it didn’t need an
audience anyway as it wasn’t trying to gather advertising revenue or justify
public funding. This is a cultural shift whose import we are still barely
beginning to understand.
But social media were also part of the economic threat to journalists’
livelihoods. As far as they were concerned, social media was a parasitic
organism which allowed its users to post their journalism for free whilst
benefiting from the resulting advertising revenue that had shifted from the
newspapers themselves. Hence their hostility to social media, their
schadenfreude at its difficulties now and the sometimes-self-righteous
tone of their fake-news-scandal reportage: whilst social media posted lies
that threatened democracy, they were the repositories of truth, of quality,
of fact-checked information, of verified, objective and impartial reporting.
Suddenly, it seemed, journalists had rediscovered their values. They wrote
about truth and objectivity as if they were employed by The Washington
Post or The New York Times, standing in a smoke-filled, 1970s newsroom,
all wide-lapels and sideburns, pulling all-nighters on the typewriter whilst
publishing the Watergate stories or Pentagon Papers. Facebook, it turned
out, wasn’t the only one being disingenuous about its activities.
Because the problem of ‘fake news’ isn’t confined to social media. What
began as a highly-specific problem of deliberately written false stories
designed to gain traction online in order to hurt a specific political cause
8 C. HAPPER ET AL.
The press has become so dishonest that if we don’t talk about it, we are
doing a tremendous disservice to the American people. Tremendous dis-
service. We have to talk about it. We have to find out what’s going on
because the press, honestly, is out of control. The level of dishonesty is out
of control. I ran for president to represent the citizens of our country. I am
here to change the broken system so it serves their families and their com-
munities well. I am talking, and really talking, on this very entrenched power
structure and what we’re doing is we’re talking about the power structure.
WEAPONIZING REALITY: AN INTRODUCTION TO TRUMP’S WAR… 9
We’re talking about its entrenchment. As a result, the media’s going through
what they have to go through to oftentimes distort — not all the time —
and some of the media’s fantastic, I have to say, honest and fantastic — but
much of it is not. The distortion, and we’ll talk about it, you’ll be able to ask
me questions about it. We’re not going to let it happen because I’m here,
again, to take my message straight to the people.16
Though the argument lost its way towards the start, this was perfect,
Trump-honed ‘dog-whistle politics’. Forget the rambling and lack of evi-
dence or cohesion, the key words were all here for his supporters to hear
and react to: the press as liars, as out of control, journalism as a broken
system, and the media as an entrenched power structure. If, in the final
months of 2016 ‘fake news’ had meant false social media stories, from
now it increasingly meant the idea that the mainstream media were liars.
This accusation stung because, essentially, it is true. Journalism likes to
believe its own mythology. This is the liberal theory of the press as ‘the
fourth estate’: as a mediatory force standing between the people and
authority, playing a key role in democracy in informing the public and in
holding authority to account through its investigations and publications.
The journalist as an indomitable, unwavering, dogged crusader-for-truth
and heroic public servant is, however, a relatively recent invention.
Journalists had actually begun as one of the lowest classes of people, let
alone classes of employment, with one seventeenth-century English pam-
phleteer referring to them as ‘This filthy Aviary, this moth-eaten crew of
News-mongers, Every Jack-sprat that hath but a pen in his ink-horn is
ready to gather up the Excrements of the Kingdom’.17 The term ‘hack’
originated with Hackney carriages, a horse-driven cab that could be hired,
before being applied to prostitutes who were similarly hired, and then was
finally applied to journalists as hired writers. Though, for many, journalism
has never quite left that low-level of company, the late nineteenth-century
industrialization and capitalization of the press brought with it a more
established role, a mass audience, increased legitimacy, a key role in the
political public sphere, and a gradual professionalization of the trade. With
that came professional organizations and a professional code of ethics, and
with it too came an impressive record of public-interest investigative
journalism.
There is no denying this record, but it isn’t the full truth of journalism,
because newspapers have, from the first, been commercial businesses:
they are created not simply to inform or hold authority to account, but
10 C. HAPPER ET AL.
What these traditions showed is that all media involve fakery: news is
not simply a truth in the world that is transparently mediated: it is always
a production in which a range of biases, values and meanings are incar-
nated. Very often, as a result of these biases—especially political biases and
market-needs—stories are published which serve particular agendas, which
are intended to manipulate and cajole, which have an at-best ambiguous
relationship to reality or which—if we are honest—are completely made-
up. This is because journalism has always been as much about bullshit as
about truth.
There were more radical traditions too, querying the ‘reality’ of media
production. One of the most remarkable analyses was Daniel Boorstin’s
The Image (1962), whose subject matter was ‘the world of our making,
how we have used our wealth, our literacy, our technology and our prog-
ress, to create the thicket of unreality which stands between us and the
facts of life’. In a world where news is expected and demanded, we have
passed from ‘news-gathering’ to ‘news-making’, Boorstin writes, leading
to the media creation of ‘pseudo-events’—of events that are not sponta-
neous but are planned and produced to be reported, with an ‘ambigu-
ous’ relationship to reality. Such media events, he says, now comprise
more and more of our experience, flooding our consciousness. In giving
rise to other events, the pseudo-event makes the ‘original’ of any phe-
nomenon impossible to discover, ultimately ‘reshaping…our very con-
cept of truth’18 in producing ‘new categories of experience…no longer
simply classifiable by the old common-sense tests of true and false’.19
Aided by a ‘graphic revolution’, the world’s complexity is reduced to
intelligible and simplified images, ‘more vivid, more attractive and more
persuasive than reality itself ’.20 This is a world where the image replaces
the original, until ‘we make, we seek and finally we enjoy, the contrivance
of all experience. We fill our lives not with experience, but with the
images of experience’.21
It was a critique that would inspire Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle
(1967) with its description of a ‘spectaclist’ society—a world where ‘all of
life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles22’, with the
images fusing in a common stream, forming ‘a pseudo-world apart, an
object of mere contemplation23’. And it would inspire too, Debord’s heir,
Jean Baudrillard, and his critique of the media ‘simulacra’ that were pro-
duced as our real experience, eclipsing the real (in a phrase taken directly
from Boorstin) by being ‘more real than the reality’.24 This critical tradi-
tion is important here because it goes much further than simply identify-
12 C. HAPPER ET AL.
sion of cable and satellite television through the 1990s. In providing more
and more channels it fractured the mainstream media, allowing niche
interests and programming to flourish and also allowing niche news. The
Fox News Channel was established in 1996, for example, to deliver highly
partisan and selective conservative news to an audience who wouldn’t get
this from the more mainstream CBS, NBC, and ABC.
But, yes, it was the internet that would eventually burst the bubble of
mainstream media and its reality. On the internet, anything went. It
became a haven for extreme material that would never—could never—
appear in the mainstream media. The hardest of hard-core pornography
wasn’t available in the afternoon on the television; ‘Two Girls, One Cup’
would never show at a cinema near you; and you’d never open up a news-
paper and see a Goatse. People with interests and opinions outside the
mainstream found a home online, a means to promote their causes and an
opportunity to communicate with others that was otherwise unavailable.
As Chris Anderson would note, the internet liberated ‘the long tail’ of
lifestyles, ideas, and hobbies that mainstream media and entertainment
wouldn’t or couldn’t cater for.26 This wasn’t necessarily bad. It meant
anything from people’s more obscure sexual identities and interests to
their love of the most niche music or popular culture could find an outlet
and others to share it with. Inevitably, however, it included extreme politi-
cal opinions that had no alternative media space to express themselves in.
The far right embraced the internet early on: the US’ leading neo-Nazi
website ‘Stormfront’ was created in 1995, the white nationalist website
‘VDare’ in 1998 and ‘Vanguard News Network’ (VNN) in 2000. The
Patriot movement, white supremacists, white nationalists, racists, and neo-
Nazis all found a home online, building a network of sites and an online
presence that would later prove important. There were others too, whose
views would coalesce with the far right online into the broad movement
that became known as the ‘alt-right’. Paleoconservatives, Neoreactionaries,
and Accelerationists all had an online audience. 4Chan, founded in 2003,
and the centre of online memes and trolling, was part of the anything-
goes, libertarian culture of the internet, but its desire to shock and drift to
the right would eventually make it and Reddit key sites for the alt-right.
The ‘manosphere’—the sites and personalities around the ‘men’s move-
ment’ and ‘pick-up-artists’—was another online culture, one with a natu-
ral affinity with the alt-right due to its misogyny and anti-feminism.
Right-wing news sites, such as Breitbart News Network, founded in 2007,
all fed upon and into the same online audiences.
14 C. HAPPER ET AL.