It has been a rough week for the US media, stomach-churning in fact. Literally.
Seven months after Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote that if Donald Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination, he would "eat the page on which the column is printed in Sunday's Post," Milbank sat down to eat some humble pie.
This week, a chef prepared an eight-course meal that included strips of Milbank’s October 4th column in a dining experience that was broadcast live online.
There were Mexican- themed dishes such as a taco bowl with grilled newspaper guacamole in a nod to Trump’s plan to build a wall along the US’s southern border and the billionaire’s Cinco de Mayo tweet last week showing him tucking into a taco bowl at Trump Tower. The meal was washed down with Trump Wine, described by Milbank as better than gasoline. He had a bottle of antacid to hand, just in case.
The writer later explained that many people had thought Trump was just “a flash in the pan” while he believed he was “dangerous” and thought voters “were better than that.”
Milbank admitted he was wrong. But he is not alone. The number of commentators now eating their words about Trump could fill many Washington restaurants.
Financial decline
The failure of the media to see the Trump phenomenon coming has exposed a fish-bowl culture created by the financial decline of the industry. Broadcasting screaming headlines about the latest outrageous statement from a media-savvy reality TV star or handing over uninterrupted minutes of air-time to live broadcasts of his rallies are more entertaining and, in turn, more lucrative in the ratings war than fact-checking remarks or policies.
In March Trump earned almost $2 billion (€1.8 billion) in free media during his campaign, according to MediaQuant, a firm that evaluates media coverage based on advertising rates. By February, he had spent just $10 million on actual adverts.
Trump’s rise has coincided with the gutting of newsrooms, intense competition in cable TV news and the growth of social media. The New Yorker exploits this with his stream of tweets to his eight million followers, bashing political opponents and the media.
Trump has shown that the old way of running political campaigns no longer works. More than $100 million was spent by Jeb Bush or his allies during the former Florida governor’s presidential bid, much of it on attack ads, yet the most damaging putdown associated with his campaign was Trump’s oft-tweeted branding of Bush as “low energy”. Trashing and trolling are so commonplace that attack ads have little effect any more.
Then there is Trump the Teflon candidate willing to say anything that feeds his populist appeal as an outsider. He justifies past controversial remarks with: “My poll numbers went up.”
Yesterday the billionaire said he would release his tax returns, a prerequisite for a candidate running for the White House, when he would release them. “It’s none of your business,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.
Declining old and emerging new media platforms – and Trump’s swapping of the dog whistle for the megaphone in Republican politics – has made him an irresistible media story and, in turn, an attractive candidate for mostly white, working-class voters who feel let down by the political and media establishment.
“We are seeing people with much more access to information sources, however unreliable they may be, to be able to make judgments and think about voting and other significant questions in a way that is much more unpredictable,” said Nicholas Mirzoeff, professor of media, culture and communication at New York University.
Free ride
Barack Obama turned on the press last week for giving Trump a free ride, castigating them for not scrutinising the presumptive Republican nominee enough and for “emphasising the spectacle and the circus” over reporting “good information”.
But his own administration has played the shifting media landscape as effectively as Trump to drill home its message, as his senior aides revealed in a New York Times Magazine profile of Ben Rhodes, Obama's "foreign-policy guru", last week.
The administration built support for Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran by creating “an echo chamber”, Rhodes told the magazine, feeding information to supportive foreign policy experts – “handpicked Beltway insiders” – to parrot on Twitter and in their reports.
“They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”
Newspapers used to have foreign bureaus, Rhodes said, but now they report on world events from Washington and rely on the White House to explain what’s going on.
“The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change,” he said.
“They literally know nothing.”
As Trump and Obama have shown, media losses have brought political gains.