The Entertainment Nexus
There's something I've written about before that I think explains a pretty good percentage of our current political situation.
The concept here is simple. (1) We crave entertainment. (2) Although news media markets itself as being informative, and some people consume it for that reason, in fact entertainment is woven through it. (3) Donald Trump is highly entertaining.
These factors interacted in a really gross way in 2015 and 2016. CNN would cover Trump rallies live because that's what a certain audience wanted, and also because he was bound to "make news" in the sense of saying something that everyone would be talking about the next day. Of course in some sense it's not actually news that Trump is willing to say buffoonish things that get people riled up. But in a sense it is, both because news is partly defined by what consumers want and because you can make a straight-faced argument that it's newsworthy for a major politician to be such an idiot. (You can imagine an alternate universe where liberals are angry at the media for covering up Trump's idiocy rather than blaring it out. However, in that universe it's hard to imagine him making much headway in the Republican primaries.)
Contrast this to a Clinton campaign speech where she "makes news" by, I don't know, proposing block grants to states to fight climate change on a local level. (I'm making this up, but you get the idea.) In a sense this is more "news-like" than some incoherent garbage from Trump. But in another sense it's not, because it's an anodyne proposal of the sort that any generic Democratic campaign will churn out, and it has no real chance of becoming law. More importantly, it's not news because it's not something that entertains news consumers. It will get dutifully written up in a few publications, but it will make no splash.
(I give credit to David Foster Wallace for identifying this dynamic and incorporating it into Infinite Jest, where the president is a professional entertainer and where addiction to entertainment is one of the defining themes.)
I've got no good answers here. "Be more entertaining!" is not particularly useful advice. I certainly don't want the Democratic Party to go full Avenatti. Also, while I think it's definitely true that Trump's tweets and the indignation they generate have been good for him on the whole, I don't think not responding is a real option, and I think luckily he's largely used up whatever political potential his Twitter strategy provided. (To put it another way, I think in the current political climate his tweets are probably actively harmful to his political fortunes, but that was not the case in 2016.)
Anyway. It's a shitty situation and I honestly don't know how to address it.
The concept here is simple. (1) We crave entertainment. (2) Although news media markets itself as being informative, and some people consume it for that reason, in fact entertainment is woven through it. (3) Donald Trump is highly entertaining.
These factors interacted in a really gross way in 2015 and 2016. CNN would cover Trump rallies live because that's what a certain audience wanted, and also because he was bound to "make news" in the sense of saying something that everyone would be talking about the next day. Of course in some sense it's not actually news that Trump is willing to say buffoonish things that get people riled up. But in a sense it is, both because news is partly defined by what consumers want and because you can make a straight-faced argument that it's newsworthy for a major politician to be such an idiot. (You can imagine an alternate universe where liberals are angry at the media for covering up Trump's idiocy rather than blaring it out. However, in that universe it's hard to imagine him making much headway in the Republican primaries.)
Contrast this to a Clinton campaign speech where she "makes news" by, I don't know, proposing block grants to states to fight climate change on a local level. (I'm making this up, but you get the idea.) In a sense this is more "news-like" than some incoherent garbage from Trump. But in another sense it's not, because it's an anodyne proposal of the sort that any generic Democratic campaign will churn out, and it has no real chance of becoming law. More importantly, it's not news because it's not something that entertains news consumers. It will get dutifully written up in a few publications, but it will make no splash.
(I give credit to David Foster Wallace for identifying this dynamic and incorporating it into Infinite Jest, where the president is a professional entertainer and where addiction to entertainment is one of the defining themes.)
I've got no good answers here. "Be more entertaining!" is not particularly useful advice. I certainly don't want the Democratic Party to go full Avenatti. Also, while I think it's definitely true that Trump's tweets and the indignation they generate have been good for him on the whole, I don't think not responding is a real option, and I think luckily he's largely used up whatever political potential his Twitter strategy provided. (To put it another way, I think in the current political climate his tweets are probably actively harmful to his political fortunes, but that was not the case in 2016.)
Anyway. It's a shitty situation and I honestly don't know how to address it.
posted by James | 10:28 AM
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