Somewhat against my will, I’ve learned a few things from this US presidential election campaign about how the media is faring, and how it might fare in its torturous aftermath. “Keep calm-ala and carry on-ala?” If only, Saturday Night Live, if only.
First off, “America Decides”, as a show title or framing device, increasingly smacks of a misnomer — effectively, only voters in swing states decide. The good news for people who don’t live in one is that they’re safe from vox pops.
Every election needs a twist and a media ready to save face when it arrives. We’ve been told forever that there are seven swing states, but the possible existence of an eighth swing state emerged at the weekend – like the discovery of a new habitable planet in the outer reaches of the solar system — as one pollster, Ann Selzer, placed Kamala Harris ahead in Iowa. No, the TV swing-state graphics were not updated.
This was the election of self-sabotaging newspaper non-endorsements. Endorsements are much better thought of as brand reaffirmations than bids to sway the masses. As such, the blocking of planned Harris endorsements by the billionaire owners of the LA Times and Washington Post proved damaging to both titles, but the Post — the one with “Democracy Dies in Darkness” as its slogan — suffered most.
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Harris called their failure to back her “disappointing”. But how upset could she be? She had just got a person of real influence, Bad Bunny, on board. Indeed, “Kamala is brat”, an X post from pop star Charli XCX, was the starting gun for a string of celebrities declaring for the Democrats.
This, again, is media catnip, but it’s hard to blame anyone for being shallow. Frankly, after a thousand split-screen arguments between two randomers from either side of the political spectrum, it’s just a relief to hear from Bruce Springsteen.
With respect to Collins Dictionary, “brat” is not the word of 2024, it’s “sanewashing”, or the tendency to make someone, in this case Donald Trump, sound more coherent and less nasty than they really are.
It’s partly a function of format. Clipped up into catchphrases and punchlines for short reports, Trump sounds the same as he always did. Uncut he sounds more unhinged than ever.
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With the caveat that all the drama — or drama-la, as Saturday Night Live would say — will still unfold on the big US news television networks, this has been the podcast election, and not just because Anthony Scaramucci has been such value-for-money on Goalhanger’s The Rest is Politics: US.
In a great gender divide for the ages, Harris guested on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy (44 minutes), while Trump did The Joe Rogan Experience (2 hours, 58 minutes), in which he squeezed in a mention of his big obsession, the “enemy from within”. The enemy within Spotify? He didn’t elaborate.
Harris also ventured into the cringe machine that is Saturday Night Live and emerged unscathed, if outshone by Maya Rudolph’s take on her impressionists’ gift of a voice. SNL’s attempts to satirise Trump, however, only proved that he is beyond satire — beyond SNL satire, in any case.
Less risky was Harris’s sit-down interview with Fox News in which she had the chance to advance the un-Fox-like view that Trump is unfit to serve. So, how is Trump getting along with Fox News these days?
“FOX NEWS IS NOT OUR FRIEND. It’s crazy!” he posted on his Truth Social platform. One of his beefs is that Fox has been accepting millions of dollars from the Democrats to show their campaign ads, almost as if that’s how the media works or something. A few weeks ago, he revealed he was “going to see Rupert Murdoch” and tell him not run “negative commercials”. Dream big, Donald.
How about the others? CBS, Trump said, should have its licence removed for the crime of editing — for length, as every broadcaster does — one of Harris’s answers in a 60 Minutes interview. He followed this up by suing it for $10 billion, alleging “election interference”.
ABC? “They ought to take away their licence,” he insisted after he was fact-checked. MSNBC and NBC News? Well, he’s attacked their owner, Comcast, on several occasions in the past, at one point railing that it should be investigated for treason.
This all gets less attention than remarks like that at Sunday’s Pennsylvania rally, where he mused about gunshot angles and noted “to get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news” — meaning the media personnel covering the event — “and I don’t mind that so much”. And yet the licence threats are chilling in their own right.
As for CNN, one of his original “fake news” targets, Trump has been repeatedly referring to its gay anchor Anderson Cooper as “Allison Cooper”. In his head, there is no insult worse than calling a man by a woman’s name.
Alas, it was on CNN that the culture of racism and bigotry propagated by Trump surfaced dismally last week. The network apologised to viewers after a Trump-supporting panellist implied that broadcaster Mehdi Hasan was a terrorist by telling him “I hope your beeper doesn’t go off”.
For balance, I will mention that CNN’s new US version of Have I Got News For You soon settled into a mercifully funny groove — an opinion that means it’s probably doomed not to be renewed.
One CNN commentator, Van Jones, also came up with the perfect soundbite for how Trump and Harris have not been set “the same exam” by the media: “He gets to be lawless, she has to be flawless.”
Now the endgame is here, talk of Ancient Rome has spiked. The new media focus is on the very real phenomenon of election anxiety, an acute condition among those unpersuaded by Trump’s promise to “fix it forever”. The official name for this is “relatable content”.
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