By Nicholas Karides
The US media created Donald Trump. Social media platforms boosted his profile and spread the epidemic that spewed his international clones, but traditional media were the first to normalise him. It is important to remember that while we caution social media users today to stop making stupid people famous, it was the mainstream media that helped make the daftest of them all president.
Long before he colonised the globe’s daily scroll Trump was paraded in the lifestyle sections of newspapers and was hyped in business features of the 1990’s.
Thirty-six years ago, on February 11, 1990, the day Nelson Mandela was released from prison (top left), the New York Daily News ran Donald Trump’s extramarital affairs on its front page. A few days later, on February 14, when the Federal Republic of Germany, the German Democratic Republic, the US, the Soviet Union, France and Britain agreed at the Ottawa Conference on Germany’s reunification, the Daily News and the New York Post (top right, bottom right) went with his affair with Marla Maples.
Trump made the cover of TIME magazine on several occasions. On the grounds of his pomposity and excesses; for the intrigue, the curiosity. It came at the peak of the media’s insatiable need to pry into celebrity lifestyles.
In the years that followed, propelled again by the hype the media created over his ghost-written book Trump: The Art of the Deal (little artistry seems to have been involved in his delusional deal with Iran), Trump became eligible for everything that celebrity status can potentially achieve in America. Including the top spot which, by then, had already been occupied by a third-rate Hollywood actor. Ronald Reagan had broadened everyone’s horizon.
By the time Trump had turned to politics, he commanded all the attention he needed. When the political scene exploded – the collapse of the economy, the inequality it brought, the implosion of the Republican Party - he began to use that attention against the media, denigrating their work, blaming them and those he claimed they represented, for America’s ills.
Having sought their attention and having toyed with them for years Trump was also prone to bouts of childish bitterness filing numerous lawsuits against those he felt mistreated him. But the media continued to oblige. The more anti-media Trump turned, the more addicted to him they became.
Even the ones that were the most critical. In 2017 CNN International’s chief executive Tony Maddox said Trump was “good for business.” The illicit affair was now consummated. He blazed ahead and took control of the narrative, making the media play by his pace and rules.
The worst was yet to come. Weaponized by Steve Bannon’s sinister strategy the Trump narrative was fed to the oddballs of QAnon, the misfits of the dark online world and the new partisan and subversive ‘media’ Trump’s gangs established. The mainstream stayed hooked. He was the president after all; the office gave legitimacy to their incessant coverage; but they were still not willing to confront how unfit he was.
Further twists awaited. Last month Paramount took over Warner Bros. which owns CNN and CBS. Trump was elated when Paramount CEO David (son of Larry) Ellison sealed the deal. He has long sought to weaken CNN (“you are fake news”) and had sued CBS (for $10bn; got a $16mn settlement).
Aside from the ominous fact that several Gulf sovereign wealth funds are attached to the Paramount financing deal, Ellison Senior had been involved in the deal that kept TikTok operating in the US. However preposterous it may sound, Trump wanted that deal and the White House actually helped him snatch it.
One by one the media are being captured, added to those already in his pocket, first among them the tech-oligarch platform owners who stood in cowardly alignment at his inauguration 15 months ago.
Journalism has a social function: tracking, alerting, scrutinizing, exposing and explaining. But also protecting: Democracy. The media is where journalism happens; but it is a business, an industry; it doesn’t exist for the journalism, it uses journalism. It exists to make money for shareholders. When the Washington Post didn’t make enough and Jeff Bezos saw it as a threat to his relationship with Trump, he just hollowed it out.
The British writer Jonathan Cook wrote recently that billionaires don’t own newspapers to foster journalistic excellence… “they own media to shape our understanding of the world, so we regard anything that benefits billionaires as in our interests too”.
Clearly, and to be fair, great journalism is found across mainstream American media, even though it is painful to see it sitting amongst the type of myopic reporting that accompanied a lot of the coverage on Gaza or the frequent sane-washing Trump himself is afforded.
Equally, and significantly, in the US there’s a surge in non profit investigative and public interest newsrooms that allow the journalism to drive the work. These are funded by individual and institutional donors and though support is growing, one gets a sense that they operate on the margins, resisting, but rarely winning.
After so many years of fooling around with Trump, mainstream media stand accused of distracting and misleading a whole country and, more seriously, now, when it matters the most, of still covering up what they always knew made him unfit for office: his maliciousness, immorality, and ineptitude.
Article published on Nicholas Karides' substack