Would a Trump loss in November be bad for the media business?
President Donald Trump. (Dennis Van Tine/STAR MAX/IPx 2016)
President Donald Trump often talks about how he is the best thing to ever happen to the media. He claims he is the reason people watch cable news networks and subscribe to papers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post. He says TV ratings will plummet and newspapers will disappear when he is no longer president.
Is he right?
Would a Trump loss in November actually be bad for the news business? It’s a topic that Vanity Fair’s Tom Kludt explores in: “‘This Gravy Train is Coming to an End’: News Media Begins to Contemplate a Post-Trump White House.”
One cable news host told Kludt, “We in the news media have thought for years that this gravy train is coming to an end. Donald Trump brought us better ratings than we ever thought we’d have by this time in 2020.” The host added that Trump has “given many of us extended relevance, or new relevance.”
This is a topic I discussed on Dan Abrams’ SiriusXM radio show in early August. That was what seems like a million news cycles ago and there’s a new explosive story almost every day.
Honestly, it’s hard to remember what life was like before Trump.
New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet told Kludt, “I think early on we probably tried to attach our traditional rules of coverage, our traditional norms, to Donald Trump — and he defied them. The American press covers extensively when the president of the United States briefs and makes comments about issues, but you have to cover it very differently when the president of the United States obfuscates and often misleads people and sometimes lies.”
So if Trump loses in November, would everything go back to the way it was before Trump? Whatever that was?
My feeling now is the same as when I spoke with Abrams: Trump has forever changed the media landscape. Cable news has changed. The nation is more polarized. That won’t change regardless of who is president.
And, even if Trump loses in November, I don't believe he will simply ride off quietly into the sunset. He still will tweet and appear on TV and, who knows, maybe even still hold rallies. Many news outlets could simply choose to not cover him, especially since he would be a private citizen with no real power. But it’s also naive to think he will be invisible and that he won’t have followers. And some coverage.
In the event of a Biden victory, Fox News, certainly, won’t become less relevant with someone in the White House to beat up every night. And everyone else will keep on keeping on with plenty of news to cover. Maybe that news won’t be Trump’s latest tweet or policy plan, but there will still be news.
I’ve also argued that a Trump victory in November could actually lead many to dissociate from the news. Those who are anti-Trump might, in a depressed and stressed state, unplug from the news for a while, especially with no upcoming election to gear up for. And what will Fox News’ primetime entertainers — Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham — complain about and attack if Republicans are in control and, again, there is no election on the horizon?
We still have a few weeks left before the election. After all that has happened in 2020, it’s hard to predict what might happen today let alone after the election or a year from now.
But, ultimately, news organizations will carry on. The New York Times has been around 169 years. The Post has been around 142 years. “Meet the Press” has been on the air since 1947. “Face the Nation” has been on since 1953. Cable news has become a viewing habit. Somehow, the news will carry on — with or without Trump.
Polling problems for the president
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden at Gettysburg National Military Park on Tuesday. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
Yes, this is an item about polls. And, yes, I realize that many folks are gun shy about polls after 2016.
Anyway, a new CNN poll shows Biden with a 57% to 41% advantage, the largest lead in any CNN poll so far. Much could be a result of the past week.
CNN’s John King said on air, “The past week was a turning point. A New York Times report that the president pays little or nothing in taxes. A disastrous debate performance. A turn for the worse in the national coronavirus case count. And then a White House COVID outbreak that includes the president being hospitalized with a virus he told us would disappear six months ago.”
So has there really been a turning point? Has the past week changed things, perhaps even among those close to the president? Appearing on CNN, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman said, “There’s no question that something is happening.”
Haberman pointed to mixed messages and dissembling coming from the White House about President Trump’s health and how that has been a problem.
“And look, the mask issue,” Haberman continued. “The president has been on the wrong side in terms of public opinion for many, many months and a lot of his advisers have tried explaining that to him and he will just not hear it.”
Meanwhile, the latest FiveThirtyEight election forecast has Biden winning 83 out of 100 times. And like the CNN poll, the past week does seem to have had an impact.
FiveThirtyEight writes, “It’s still really difficult to measure the effects of Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis on the election, but we can see how the polls have changed after the first presidential debate, and at this point, Biden has made some modest gains — on average, a 1.5-percentage-point gain in the 11 national and 11 state polls that have been released since the debate and for which we have a pre-debate poll.”
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