Are we heading for a Trump news slump? He’s been at the centre of the world’s biggest stories since at least 2016 — from the rise of populist authoritarianism to COVID. He’s sent some readers fleeing to fact-based media while encouraging others to amplify the echo of conservative voices.
Who will miss him more if, as all polls suggest, he loses this week’s election?
Rupert Murdoch is already carefully pre-positioning. According to The Washington Post he’s been telling associates he’s resigned to a Trump loss but that it would have worked out differently if Trump had listened to him and taken the pandemic seriously.
Hmm… I’m sure Dan Andrews would like a word about that.
The trouble was that Trump was listening to Murdoch — or at least to his network, Fox News. Like plenty of News Corp commentators here in Australia, the Fox pundits have been socially distancing from the science and endorsing a let-‘er-rip Swedish approach. It’s been more hydroxychloroquine than helpful advice.
While Murdoch is “resigned”, his news outlets are doubling down on Trump. The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal and Fox News have been reporting out the alleged Hunter Biden emails story. This is despite internal opposition from the remaining fact-based loyalists on the news side of the organisations.
Like the front pages in this past month’s Courier-Mail, this puts to rest the supposition that Murdoch backs winners. Once, maybe. Now — and for at least the past decade — the outlets he co-manages with son Lachlan are standing staunch on the bridge as the campaign slowly slides underwater.
It looks like the company is positioning itself to be the voice of the resistance to an incoming Democratic administration. (Queenslanders will know what that means.) As a business strategy, it may be working for Fox News, with both audiences and advertising reportedly up this year.
For the News Corp side of the family holdings? Not so much. The right-wing market is just not big enough in, say, Queensland or Victoria to sustain the company’s conservative tabloids — particularly now that the Clive Palmer ads look like drying up.
News Corp’s conscious polarisation of politics in both Australia and the US has alienated key demographics needed to build a media voice for the future. These include university-educated under-55s and anyone whose political views range from mildly right-of-centre out to the extreme left.
There’s no Australian Trump and Trump is central to Fox’s US success. His daily tweets, interviews and rallies provide critical content. He amplifies both the Fox brand and its right-wing talking points. He brings in his audience and protects the network when he warns his supporters away from alternate views in the “fake news” media.
Maybe the Murdochs don’t have any choice. Their two companies are deeply positioned in the right-wing noise machine, with Trump on one side and a populist ecosystem of activists, armed militias and conservative media on the other (from the “alt-right” to the “alt-light”, as New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz has called it).
This denies them the flexibility to pivot to the centre as they once could with, say, a Tony Blair in mid-’90s Britain. Trump has already demonstrated to them that support runs both ways, tweeting criticisms to hold Fox close. Nervous about the impact, Fox has usually followed along.
How will that work with an inevitably weakened post-president Trump?
There’s a risk, too, for fact-based media. Around the world, anti-Trumpists have spent the past four years trawling through news feeds to see just how bad things are. There’s even a word for it: “doomscrolling”.
The lure of doom gave news media a Trump bump following his election in 2016, with subscriptions jumping for US papers. (COVID-19 provided a further boost this year.)
As Barack Obama said on the weekend: “With Joe and Kamala … you’re not going to have to think about them every day. You’re not going to have to argue with your family about him every day. It won’t be so exhausting. You’ll be able to get on with your lives.”
Between the diminution of the Trump foghorn and this return to a news-lite normalcy, it’s hard to tell who’d miss Trump most.
The Queensland election and the loyalty of the population to Dan Andrews shows that Murdoch is losing some power over the population. Rudd’s petition, increased access to the more independent media and enough of the population waking up to the bullying tactics and lies of Murdoch are making a difference. Trump is a showman, and in a way a freak, and freak shows attract publicity and sell papers. Fox will miss the freak show if hopefully Trump is taken out of the White House. However there will be the after effects of theTrumpian supporters and goodnessknows what havoc they are going to wreak on the country so there will still be plenty for Fox to exploit in these events.
“he’s been telling associates he’s resigned to a Trump loss but that it would have worked out differently if Trump had listened to him and taken the pandemic seriously.”
Sure, Rupert. Yep, you were really out there advising people to mask up, stay indoors and socially distance. You were all over it.
Totally. Believe. You!
“the alleged Hunter Biden emails story”
Quite a bit of the material – especially as it affects China (including China’s unexpectedly rapid development of American-style anti-vibration technology for its F-35 equivalent) – is publicly available on the Taiwanese TV network GTV. I don’t know enough about Chinese and Ukrainian politics to evaluate it, but it looks to me to be more than an “alleged … emails story”. Much more. And Joe Biden is refusing to address the vast range of matters raised.
News networks that don’t dig into this could be culpable participants in a massive scandal.
Try Yasha Levine on Twitter as a starting point, Keith, and/or Matt Taibbi.
Thank you. Taibbi is consistently good value. I subscribed to him following your prompt.
No problem, Keith. There’s also a very good interview available around the web. It was done a few days ago, with the great Chris Hedges interviewing Taibbi, on ‘the rapidly disintegrating media landscape, and its consequences’.
Another excellent blog on youtube a couple of days ago is Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper from Useful Idiots interviewing Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti from Rising on Election Day 2020.
Taibbi & Glenn Greenwald have both now left the Intercept (which the latter helped found) because of editor bots have refused to publish their reportage of on Biden et fils.
They have now moved to substackdotcom
So where ARE these supposed e-mails then? Let’s see a print-out of them if they really exist. I mean, as if News Corpse would hesitate for a microsecond putting them to print if they really had them!
They have them – some might say that they created them – but the reason you’ll never see them is because they do not show what the NewsCorpse hacks, & worse, claim.
I’m not sure how Joe Biden can address emails that relate to, but may not have been written by, his son, some time ago, relating to something that all media outlets have judged to be less than interesting and certainly have no ties to Joe Biden, and are only being talked about because Col Allan went against other staff in his outlet to publish very non-specific allegations other than a reference to “the big guy” which included a response saying no to a cut to “the big guy”. i.e. has there been anything remotely substantive put out anywhere, anything other than tenuous links and conspiracy theories?
Argh- agreed…and as for the unearthed laptop? It’s sad to see Trump supporters call out Joe Biden’s defense of Hunter as egregiously nepotistic without irony. His whole unqualified inept family being on the payroll doesn’t rate a mention and don’t get me started on the use of Mar A Lago for government functions—-