“We’re stuck with Trump” is the new “Robert Mueller is about to get fired”
For the past year, each time Special Counsel Robert Mueller has made a big move against Donald Trump, large chunks of the mainstream media (on the left and right) have told us that Trump was about to fire Mueller at any second. In every instance this has proven to have been nothing more than baseless hype, aimed at scaring everyone into staying tuned in. Now that the prosecution of Trump has been spread out to everyone from the SDNY to Michael Avenatti, the media can no longer paralyze us with fear by telling us Mueller is supposedly about to get fired. So now there’s a new tactic.
In reality, Trump is in his deepest hole to date. Prosecutors are carving him up from all sides, and he has no tools for stopping any of them. Michael Cohen and Roger Stone are both about to get arrested soon, and the odds are that one or both will flip on him; these are the two guys who know his personal secrets better than anyone else outside of his family. But over the past week or two, one prominent liberal voice after another in the mainstream media has pessimistically announced that they think Donald Trump is here to stay. What are they basing this on? Nothing more than some generic gloss-over. Why? Ratings.
There are no good ratings to be had right now by simply telling your audience the truth: Trump’s demise is more assured than ever, but because the political process and criminal justice process each have their own peculiar internal clocks, Trump isn’t going down tomorrow, or next week, or even necessarily next month. In football terms, Trump is down by ten touchdowns, but the clock still has to run out. The big question is whether political and criminal pressure forces Trump out before the midterms, or whether the Democrats force him out after the midterms. But there is no realistic scenario where he makes it to the end of his term, or even particularly close to the end of his term.
Just don’t tell that to the liberal pundits on your television. Cable news can’t afford to let its audience know that we’re all in something of a holding pattern until we reach the next big milestone on the path to Trump’s inevitable demise. So instead the people on your television find ways to make you think you can’t afford to look away for a minute, and that nearly always involves manipulating your emotions so that they swing rapidly and wildly between hope and fear.
For that reason, with just a few exceptions, I usually try to watch as little political television as possible. Cable news is generally centered around a handful of cherry picked ratings-friendly narratives, at the expense of all the other important political developments that are going on. Sometimes those narratives aren’t even truthful – and no, I’m not just talking about Fox News. During the election, MSNBC spent at least as much time flat out lying about Hillary Clinton’s emails as Fox did. Yet we’re all tempted to keep tuning in, because cable news is entertaining and pulse pounding and addictive. Reading the news on your screen, even if it’s more accurate and thoughtful, isn’t as easy or entertaining.
The operating expenses for cable television networks are sky high, and more than any other news medium, they have to hit their ratings marks every day to keep the lights on (we all saw Al Jazeera America go bankrupt because it refused to play the ratings hype game). When it’s a relatively slow news week, cable news has to come up with something to keep us tuned in. So when Donald Trump is in a particularly deep but poorly defined hole, as he is now, MSNBC and CNN decide to catch us off guard by telling us that he’s magically going to get away with it all. When things occasionally are looking slightly up for Trump, that’s when the media swings back to blowing up his scandals. It’s not about helping or hurting Trump, as partisanship is secondary to the fact that this is a business. It’s about ratings.
That’s not to say that cable news is useless as a format. We can all name certain cable news hosts who provide something far more accurate and thoughtful than others. But at the end of the day cable news hosts are all a slave to the format, meaning that on a comparatively slow news day, they must find a way to keep you tuned in for the full hour – even if it means scaring you into thinking that what’s about to happen is the opposite of what they know is really about to happen.
All news formats have their flaws. Major newspapers do the best job of using inside connections to expose major scandals. But we’ve learned the hard way that those same newspapers sometimes kill off crucial stories, harming the public interest in the process, because they’re afraid of burning their bridges with those inside connections. And of course I don’t have to tell you the pros and cons of getting your news from the internet.
The bottom line is this: take in the news, and then do your own critical thinking. You know what the latest developments are. Does the analysis from any given pundit make logical sense in light of those developments? Keep track of whose reporting and analysis has been vindicated over the long run, and keep in mind that when a news outlet is the first to piece something together, it can take awhile for the other outlets to catch up. Don’t rely on supposed shortcuts such as lists and charts that claim to know which news outlets are “good” or “bad” or “biased” (these lists and charts always turn out to be works of fiction from people with an axe to grind). Don’t automatically trust fact checking sites, without doing your own fact checking of their fact checking. Some of the “fact checking” sites are run by the biggest con artists on the internet, because they know their work won’t be scrutinized.
Track record is crucial. But when it comes to track record, you have to do your own scorekeeping; you can’t get it from someone else. Political news outlets dishonestly attack each other all the time to try to gain a competitive advantage, so you can’t just google a news site’s name and see what its competitors are claiming about it. Liberal news sites are usually lying about other liberal news sites, because they compete with each other. Conservative news sites are usually lying about other conservative news sites, because they compete with each other. This kind of thing isn’t about partisanship; it’s a business.
At the end of the day, you have to do your own critical analysis of what you’re hearing from the various political news outlets out there. You have to filter everything based on what kind of media format you’re hearing it from, whether any of it makes logical sense, and which specific writers and pundits have proven themselves in your eyes over a period of time. Keep in mind that political news outlets are a business, and they’re selling you a product. You’ve got to filter everything you hear – or else you end up getting tricked into believing that Donald Trump is somehow magically in the clear, even as he’s suffering through his worst month yet.
