When Trump wins, so does the media

One from the archives. Happy Veterans Day!

Today is Veterans Day, and per usual, Slow Boring is taking the holiday as an opportunity to share a previously pay-walled post. This one, about the complicated relationship between Trump and the media, is from last year, but I think it’s an important reminder as we face a second Trump presidency. I don’t want to be read as promulgating a conspiracy theory that the press “wanted” Trump to win. But incentives matter in life and there’s a difference between the kind of Trump coverage that drives ratings and the kind that moves voters.

And for me, revisiting this topic is a reminder of how lucky I am to be able to making a living writing independently. As always, I’m grateful to all of you for making that possible. I hope everyone has a lovely Veterans Day.

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Slow Boring launched in the wake of the 2020 election, but I began making my plans for the site well before. And while I thought Joe Biden would probably win, I wasn’t certain.

So I was nervous on Election Day, mostly because I care about the future of the country, but also because I care about my career and my family, and I thought a second Trump administration would be bad for my new project. Not that Trump winning would invalidate my ideas — in my opinion that would have, if anything, strengthened the case for them — but I don’t think that’s how it would have been interpreted. And I don’t think Trump being in the White House is very good for audience interest in my work.

The two best journalistic niches during Trump’s presidency were scoopy reporting, with the goal of obtaining new anecdotes that re-confirmed people’s belief that the orange man is bad (we recently had a good one of these about Trump’s visceral disgust at the sight of disabled veterans), and columns that elegantly restated liberals’ visceral disgust with Trump. These are totally fine styles of journalism; I’ve consumed a lot of both and tried my hand at some of the latter, but neither happens to be my personal forte. In terms of my own sense of professional fulfillment, the best parts of the Trump years were the relatively “normal” ones covering ACA repeal and TCJA. I think I’m good at that kind of thing, and while I think it would be bad for America if Nikki Haley or Mike Pence beat Joe Biden, I do think those outcomes would be fine for me since they would run businesslike administrations focused on implementing right-wing policy, and I could write about that.

For most people in the media, though, the incentives go the other way.

The Trump administration was a ratings bonanza. Trump sold newspaper subscriptions and he drove clicks. Every well-sourced reporter in Washington got a great book deal to write about Trump-era politics. Trump’s administration was such a constant whirl of chaos that there were always fun leaks and crazy anecdotes emerging. You could get Republican members of Congress to say the wildest things about the incumbent president. I think very few journalists voted for Trump or believed that his ideas and policies were good for the country. But it was, objectively, a good time professionally for a lot of journalists, and it was definitely good for the companies that employed them. As Leslie Moonves said back in 2016, “It May Not Be Good for America, but It’s Damn Good for CBS.”

And I think that’s a relevant frame for understanding media coverage of the coming Biden-Trump fight.

For-profit enterprises tend to be good at aligning their work with the goal of making money, or else they’d find themselves going out of business. Reporters work for editors, who work for higher-level managers, who report to executives, who are accountable to boards and shareholders. The job is to cover the campaign for maximum revenue and minimum expense, not to inform the public — and if doing a bad job of informing the public puts Trump back in the White House, that is objectively not a bad thing from the standpoint of ratings, ad sales, and subscriptions. And rather than whining about the media not having “learned its lesson,” I think Democrats need to say more clearly that business is business and Trump winning is good for business.

Joe Biden is bad for business

Whenever a new administration comes to town, reporters start getting contracts to write books about it. And the Biden administration is no exception.

The problem is that sales have been terrible, as Daniel Lippman reported for Politico:

New York magazine writer Gabriel Debenedetti’s “The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama” has sold fewer than 1,500 copies, according to NPD BookScan. The Associated Press’ Julie Pace and Darlene Superville’s “Jill: A Biography of the First Lady” has sold fewer than 2,500 and Chris Whipple’s “The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House” and POLITICO’s Ben Schreckinger’s “The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power” have each racked up fewer than 5,000 books sold.

That’s in contrast to the almost million copies that Michael Wolff’s Trump-focused “Fire and Fury” sold, according to NPD BookScan, and the more than 400,000 copies that Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s “Peril” sold, among many other Trump-focused books on which publishers made a killing.

And this is not unique to book publishing. Engagement with news media fell off a cliff when Biden entered the White House.

And note that this is not just about Covid. Looking just at Biden’s first 100 days in office — a time when a lot of pandemic measures were still in place, when the vaccine was just being rolled out, and when any administration is at its most interesting as it fills cabinet posts and launches a legislative agenda — Pew notes that people basically did not care, with only 22% of the public saying they were following things closely. Axios finds that news consumption fell even further in 2022. Biden’s first State of the Union got ratings equal to Trump’s lowest-rated SOTU, and then ratings fell precipitously for his next one.

This is all sort of funny in the sense that one of the things Biden promised back in 2020 was to be a more boring president who focused on the job rather than on making news.

But for the news industry, it’s a genuine crisis. In December of 2022, it came out that the Washington Post had lost over 15% of its subscribers since Biden took office, leading to layoffs. CNN ratings keep falling and are now at record-low levels. Some of that obviously is structural, but that’s the point — Trump was a salve to an industry in structural decline. You obviously can’t lay all the many media industry layoffs across 2023 at Biden’s feet, but he doesn’t help.

Incentives help us understand coverage decisions

None of this changes the fact that journalists are a significantly left-leaning bunch.

But there’s a difference between coverage that reflects progressive values and worldviews and coverage that’s instrumentally useful to Joe Biden. This month, I’ve read one New York Times climate writer laud Biden for “cracking down on drilling” and another slam him for “climate hypocrisy” because he hasn’t cracked down on drilling. What you won’t find in the Times is an article praising him for having a measured approach that combines record domestic production with a long-term strategy to reduce global oil demand. It’s not that the Times’ choices of angles on this reflect a secret right-wing agenda — they reflect a sincere level of climate hawkishness — but both pieces manage, I think, to be to the cause of his reelection.

And I think you see something similar in the puzzling coverage around the politics of the UAW strike.

Even as slight a gesture as Trump traveling to Michigan at the invitation of the bosses of a non-union truck parts factory has been portrayed in large swathes of the press as him supporting the striking workers. At the same time, we had multiple cycles of coverage hitting Biden for being insufficiently supportive of the strike. I think in both cases, the coverage fundamentally reflects a pro-union slant on the part of the journalists crafting the stories. By exaggerating Trump’s pro-labor bona fides and minimizing Biden’s, they successfully spurred Biden into walking the picket line as a gesture of support — a big win for the UAW, as to the best of anyone’s knowledge no prior president has done that.

This is a progressive-slanted media lending a helping hand to striking workers, not a right-wing media conspiracy. But it’s true that the practical upshot was a misleadingly moderate picture of Trump, one that forced Biden to shift substantively to the left — developments that are objectively good for Trump’s cause.

Fox News, by contrast, doesn’t hit Trump from the right when he makes moderate noises on abortion. That’s good for Trump, indicating that he’ll have tactical flexibility to say whatever he needs to say to try to win the election and appoint hard-right judges and regulators. Why does Fox treat him with such kid gloves? Well, Trump is good for their ratings, too. His refusal to participate in their GOP primary debates was bad for Fox News to the point where they had to offer special discounts on ads for the second debate. They want Trump to like them so he’ll appear on their network and gift them a ratings lift.

A problem we saw during the 2016 campaign is that while many, many Trump scandals got covered, there was a convention of devoting roughly equal time to coverage of both candidates. As a result, no individual Trump scandal received nearly as much coverage as the Hillary email saga, allowing Trump to, in effect, benefit from the sheer breadth of wrongdoing. These days, similarly, there is a relentless drumbeat of “he’s old, his son is shady” about Biden while Trump overwhelms the system with the sheer quantity of crazy stuff happening.

Except while I described this as “a problem,” it’s not clear that there actually is a problem from a management perspective — the coverage of the 2016 campaign was very popular, ratings-wise, and Trump in office was even better for ratings.

The media is not your friend

It’s of course completely fair for Democrats to complain about coverage that’s bad, both in terms of holding people to their stated editorial values and even for the sake of “working the refs.”

But it’s also important for politicians and staffers and activists and readers to understand that business is business. The goal is to get people to click and watch and subscribe, and editors and managers are going to do what it takes to achieve that goal.

I’m personally grateful every single day to have the opportunity to write for a medium-sized audience of paying customers who I think value an approach with integrity. It’s amazing to have an audience that’s actually valuable on a per-reader basis so we can try to treat you all well. That’s just not the reality on the ad-supported web or on television or digital media.

More broadly, though, we lack a media ecosystem that’s friendly to pragmatic progressive politics. There’s a very active and successful conservative media that’s good at promoting the right’s best issues. There’s a left-leaning commercial press that fundamentally cares more about making money than about wielding their influence constructively. And there’s a pretty effective left media contingent that serves as a kind of enforcement arm for activists. That leaves a void to be filled.

But for now, the reality is that Trump is good for business and the coverage is going to reflect that.