THE POLITICS OF GREED
What is fuelling the rise of Donald Trump? Look no further than the profits of the U.S. TV networks.
By the end of election day Nov. 8, the overwhelming majority of American voters will have flushed Donald Trump’s squalid presidential candidacy down the sewer. That much is virtually certain.
But what is also certain is that this won’t be the end of it. Like a poison running through the bloodstream, this insane Trump insurgency will continue to haunt America’s democracy for years to come. So who is to blame? Decades from now when history passes its final judgment on who enabled this madness, there will be many defendants in the dock.
There will, of course, be Trump himself and the extreme right-wing, neo-fascist crowd — that shadowy “basket of deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton described them — that directs his candidacy from the backrooms. But there will be many more. There will also be the cowardly political class that has allowed itself in recent years to be bought and sold like cattle by American billionaires. Their complicity in making Trump possible has coarsened and corrupted the American political process to a dangerous degree.
And, not to be forgotten, there will be the millions of unthinking Americans — in an otherwise generous country — who have parked their brains at the door by indulging their baser instincts against Muslims, women and minorities.
But at the head of the line and in a dock by themselves will be the people running the U.S. commercial television networks — the owners, managers and senior journalists.
To their lasting shame, they have enabled the unlikely Trump candidacy to happen and to flourish not out of public service or journalistic honour — but out of greed. It has made them loads and loads of money.
Or as CBS head Leslie Moonves: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” That, to put it mildly, is an understatement.
As Donald Trump’s standing sank in the polls, he blamed it on “media bias.” As recently as last Thursday, he whined: “The media poisons the mind of the American voter. They really do.”
Well, if they do, it is not in the way that Trump means.
In recent days, there have been reports revealing how little U.S. television airtime has actually been devoted to coverage of policy in this campaign, how much uncritical airtime has been devoted to Trump’s speeches and rallies compared with his competitors and — perhaps most significantly — how many billions TV networks earned from the Trump phenomenon.
Let’s start with the money, since that now drives America’s democratic process.
The Washington Post reported this week that, largely as a result of round-the-clock Trump coverage, CNN “will approach $1 billion in gross profit in 2016, a milestone unseen in its 36-year history.” Fox News and MSNBC are also expected to have their most lucrative years.
CNN, in particular, has been ridiculed for handing its airtime over to repetitive Trump rallies — particularly when Trump started to build his image. Twice, when CNN hosted a debate among Republican contenders, it followed its live coverage not by switching to commentators for analysis, but to one-on-one interviews with Trump himself.
Perhaps the most damning indictment of U.S. TV journalism comes from the highly respected Tyndall Report, which has tracked the nightly flagship news programs for decades. In the U.S. broadcast media, these programs largely set the news agenda.
In its most recent report, Tyndall reveals that these programs have virtually abandoned the coverage of issues and policy compared with previous campaigns. In 2008, the last time both parties nominated new candidates for the White House, the NBC, ABC and CBS newscasts devoted 220 minutes to issues coverage.
This year, it is down to only 32 minutes among the three networks so far. According to the Tyndall Report, they have ignored most key issues: “No trade, no health care, no climate change, no drugs, no poverty, no guns, no infrastructure, no deficits. To the extent that these issues have been mentioned, it has been on the candidates’ terms, not on the networks’ initiative.”
Are we therefore surprised that so many Americans are so uninformed about what is at stake?
We can only be consoled that America’s silent majority — its informed adults — will show up on Nov. 8 to end this nonsense, at least for now. Tony Burman is former head of Al Jazeera English and CBC News. Follow him @TonyBurman.