TRUMP’S MEDIA WAR Edited by Catherine Happer, Andrew Hoskins and William Merrin Trump’s Media War Catherine Happer • Andrew Hoskins William Merrin Editors Trump’s Media War Editors Catherine Happer Andrew Hoskins University of Glasgow University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK Glasgow, UK William Merrin Swansea University Swansea, UK ISBN 978-3-319-94068-7 ISBN 978-3-319-94069-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94069-4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950072 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub- lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu- tional affiliations. Cover illustration: RetroSupply Co. Cover design by Ian Wilson and Oscar Spigolon This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland P reface Bewildered, exasperated, and exhausted, the liberal left mainstream news media appeared defeated a year into President Trump’s openly declared war against them. Katy Waldman (2018) in an essay in Slate entitled ‘There’s Nothing More to Learn About Trump’ concedes, ‘The more we cover him, the more we excite the desire to explain away, account for, and tame his outra- geous behavior. But we can’t. All we can do is stoke the fever with fresh data points, new revelations’. Kyle Pope (2018), editor-in-chief of Columbia Journalism Review, writes, ‘We continue to spend our days, and our audience’s time, reacting to the president’s bumbling with a level of disbelief and outrage that has boiled over into a stinking froth’. And several months earlier, Mark Danner (2017) in The New York Review of Books wrote, ‘It is our outrage, our disgust, our knee-jerk shock and condemnation that animate the play and give verisimilitude to the battle being fought. We are the enemy and our screams of dismay are vital to the drama’. And yet this ‘we’, this ‘media’, that Trump is at war with, is merely a ghost of what was the liberal left mainstream media. The media’s disbelief at Trump is increasingly a cover for their own anger at having been pushed out of that place from where they once painted the world in their own colours. The catastrophic fall of the mainstream is not a matter of the digi- tal tsunami upending the business of news but is rather the widespread ‘post-trust’ (Happer and Hoskins forthcoming) contempt from the left and the right it is now held in. As Angela Nagle (2017, 2–3) describes, ‘It v vi PREFACE is a career disaster now to signal your left-behind cluelessness as a basic bitch, a normie or a member of the corrupt media mainstream in any way’. Trump’s war on media continues to be fundamentally armed by a uniquely potent mix of a new critical mass of anti-establishment fervour and the mainstream’s deep resentment of precisely this, or at least its act- ing in the vain hope that the multitude will stop hating it and that it will shake off its Trump dependency. The latter seems more likely to arrive— resulting from Trump leaving office—than the former (hatred of the establishment) but only because Trump’s period in office has term limits. To tell the story of Trump’s war on media then requires a holistic vehi- cle that can at least illuminate the right and left’s collusion in outrage alongside a vision of the imploding mainstream. Through a series of short interventions from academics and journalists, this volume interrogates the emergent media war fought by Donald Trump in a fluid digital media ecology. Rather than a standard edited vol- ume of extended essays, we use a series of interconnected clustered themes to set an agenda for exploration of Trump as the principal beneficiary as well as a sign of the shattering of mainstream consensual reality. This work began through a symposium hosted by the College of Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow in June 2017. We are very grateful to all our participants and our contributors here for their innovative work on this project. Finally, thanks to Lina Aboujieb, Heloise Harding, Connie Li, Martina O’Sullivan, Lucy Batrouney, and the proposal reviewers in helping guide us through to these final pages. Glasgow, UK Catherine Happer Andrew Hoskins Swansea, UK William Merrin references Danner, Mark. 2017. What He Could Do. The New York Review of Books. 23 March. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/03/23/what-trump-could-do/ Happer, Catherine, and Hoskins, Andrew. Forthcoming. Broken Media: The Post- Trust Crisis of the Mainstream. Nagle, Angela. 2017. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-right. Alresford: Zero Books. PREFACE vii Pope, Kyle. 2018. It’s time to rethink how we cover Trump. Columbia Journalism Review. 22 January. https://www.cjr.org/covering_trump/trump-coverage- inauguration-press-media.php Waldman, Katy. 2018. There’s Nothing More to Learn About Trump. Please enjoy this essay about him. Slate. 22 January. https://slate.com/news-and- politics/2018/01/theres-nothing-more-to-learn-about-trump-please-enjoy- this-essay-about-him.html c ontents Part I Killing the Media 1 1 Weaponizing Reality: An Introduction to Trump’s War on the Media 3 Catherine Happer, Andrew Hoskins, and William Merrin 2 Trump and the Press: A Murder-Suicide Pact 23 Jeff Jarvis Part II Fake News 31 3 Turning the Tables: How Trump Turned Fake News from a Weapon of Deception to a Weapon of Mass Destruction of Legitimate News 33 Paul Levinson 4 Trump’s War Against the Media, Fake News, and  (A)Social Media 47 Douglas Kellner ix x CONTENTS 5 The War of Images in the Age of Trump 69 Tom Allbeson and Stuart Allan Part III Reporting Trump: Building the Brand 85 6 ‘Authentic’ Men and ‘Angry’ Women: Trump, Reality Television, and Gendered Constructions of Business and Politics 87 Lisa W. Kelly 7 Covering Trump: Reflections from the Campaign Trail and the Challenge for Journalism 101 Peter Geoghegan 8 The Scottish Provenance of Trump’s Approach to the Media 113 David Torrance Part IV The Politics of Performance 127 9 The Donald: Media, Celebrity, Authenticity, and Accountability 129 Michael Higgins 10 The Big Standoff: Trump’s Handshakes and the Limits of News Values 143 Ben O’Loughlin 11 “Classic Theatre” as Media Against Trump: Imagining Chekhov 159 John Tulloch CONTENTS xi 12 Trump and Satire: America’s Carnivalesque President and His War on Television Comedians 183 Alex Symons Part V Media Out of the Margins 199 13 President Troll: Trump, 4Chan and Memetic Warfare 201 William Merrin 14 Trump, the First Facebook President: Why Politicians Need Our Data Too 227 Jennifer Pybus 15 Trump’s Foreign Policy in the Middle East: Conspiratorialism in the Arab Media Sphere 241 Abdullah K. Al-Saud and Dounia Mahlouly Index 257