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In my latest for @CJR I demonstrate that cable news media has essentially been covering Trump with 2015-6 campaign level intensity for four years straight. Exhausted? No wonder: https://www.cjr.org/politics/cable-news-trump-obsession.php
It also shows that, contrary to many expectations, it is NOT @FoxNews that gives Trump the most airtime -- but instead @MSNBC (trying to outrage their viewers into staying glued to their seats). @CNN consistently the lowest of the three, but generally close to Fox.
In a previous @CJR essay, I showed that similar trends hold for print media -- where Trump has transcended being a *topic* of the news, and instead has become something like a lens through which all other stories are interpreted: https://www.cjr.org/covering_the_election/new-york-times-trump.php
This obsession is corrosive for our knowledge environment and the health of our democracy. But it's VERY good for business. As I explore in both pieces, companies have been making $$ hand over fist by leaning into Trump mania. See also this @benyt essay: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/06/business/media/trump-election-journalists.html
I cannot stress enough how important the financial incentives are for many of the patterns observed here. For instance, many think cable news companies' product is the reporting they deliver. This is not correct. Nor are their readers/ viewers their primary customers. In fact...
The readers/ viewers of media content are *the product* they sell to advertisers, who are their primary customers (alongside distributors like Cox, DirectTV). The content they put out is a manufacturing process -- producing viewers/ readers of advertisements out of citizens...
The more viewers/ readers they can produce -- especially from the demographics that their customers (i.e. advertisers) are eager to reach -- the more money they can charge interested parties in order to reach those viewers.
Print media is a little different because they receive a solid share of revenue from subscriptions -- but ads are the primary source of income, and therefore *advertisers* are the primary customers, across the board: https://www.journalism.org/2014/03/26/revenue-sources-a-heavy-dependence-on-advertising/
As Chomsky, @ggreenwald and others have pointed out -- this reliance on corporate advertising revenues for solvency creates incentives for them to avoid certain kinds of stories, and to prioritize others (clickworthy identity-politics focused content) instead.
Across the political spectrum, @realDonaldTrump is basically the ultimate clickbait; so they just keep on him as much as possible. S. media amplifies these impulses as outlets try to leverage platform brain-hacking structure ( https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/social-media-democracy/600763/) to maximize online ad revenue
Disturbingly, these patterns hold even for outlets like @nytimes, which are able to make a majority of their income on circulation: https://www.statista.com/statistics/192911/revenue-of-the-new-york-times-company-by-source/
Why? B/c their strategy for maximizing subscribers is basically to paint themselves as Trump oppo: https://musaalgharbi.com/2019/11/13/media-obsessed-trump/
Why? B/c their strategy for maximizing subscribers is basically to paint themselves as Trump oppo: https://musaalgharbi.com/2019/11/13/media-obsessed-trump/
Consequently, the coverage trends in the NY Times are not substantially different from MSNBC, even though the former gets a larger share of their revenue from circulation instead of ads.
