How News Media and Partisan Influencers Responded to Trump’s Media Bashing

• In Event: The Negative Effects of Traditional Media

Abstract

Public trust in news media has been steadily declining for decades. However, the past few years have witnessed an increasingly divergent assessment of news media, with greater distrust from Republicans. This partisan discrepancy can be partly attributed to the consistent attacks from Donald Trump on mainstream media during his candidacy and presidency. As a populist politician, he has created a pronounced division between “us” and “them” by establishing the enemies of the people. Mainstream media and journalists are depicted as one type of elites that express “disdain for the unseen masses of the us.” Such media-bashing was central to Trump because it not only galvanized his supporters online and offline but also generated the social media engagement necessary for attracting greater news media attention. However, little attention has been paid to how news media and emerging partisan influencers across the ideological spectrum responded to Trump’s media-bashing on Twitter and how they, alongside or in opposition to Trump, might affect partisans’ evaluations of news media. By filling this gap, we seek to contribute to research on populism, the hybrid media system, and elite rhetoric.
Populist politicians share some key tactics and strategies. First, they juxtapose “the pure people” against the “the corrupt elites”, to delegitimize all established authorities such as mainstream media, scientists, and elected politicians. Second, populist leaders portray themselves as outsiders to corrupt politics and champions of the ordinary people, usually through social media to bypass the journalists. In particular, social media and populism share “an elective affinity” as social media provide a space for people to vent their dissatisfaction with the elites and band together to support their populist leaders. This affinity is also reflected in how populist politicians heavily use social media to spread their populist messages and appeals. In this study,
we investigate how key actors on social media, including news media and emerging partisan influencers, respond to attacks on mainstream media by charismatic populist leaders as part of populist rhetoric.
Specifically, we zoom in on the U.S. context and the media bashing rhetoric wielded by Donald Trump. Adopting populist rhetoric, Trump cultivated a hostility toward mainstream media among the conservatives through simple, repetitive, and emotionally-evocative attacks by depicting news media as “fake news” and “enemy of the people” on Twitter. Trump’s criticism of the media has reinforced the longstanding belief among conservatives that the media has a liberal bias, further solidifying a shared conservative identity.
However, it remains unclear whether Trump’s anti-media rhetoric spurred discussion of media elites from both sides and whether they remediated his media-bashing rhetoric. Despite that populist politicians delegitimize news media through intense attacks, they court media attention for visibility, something that Trump has done successfully. And news media might amplify populist politicians’ inflammatory rhetoric for audience attention, particularly driven by social media buzz. We hypothesize that traditional news media and emerging partisan influencers across the political spectrum invariably pursued the attention object that is Trump’s media bashing tweets (H1).
However, different parts of the media system might react to Trump’s media bashing differently through framing. Following Trump’s anti-press rhetoric on Twitter, right-wing media consistently delegitimize the mainstream media. While studies in the context of Israel and Australia reveal that mainstream journalists tend to avoid responding to populist media criticism. Therefore, we raise the following question: Responding to Trump’s media bashing tweets, did traditional right-wing, left-wing, and mainstream media as well as partisan influencers apply different frames? (RQ1)
We collected Trump’s media bashing tweets (n = 2377)from a GitHub archive using the following keywords: “news,” “media, ” “journalism, ” “journalist, ” “report, ” “story, ” “stories,” “cnn,” “new york times,” “abc,” “cbs,” “fox,” “msnbc,” “breitbart,” “washington post,” “wall street journal,” “wsj,” “nbc,” “la times”, and “ap.” We focus on 2020 given that Trump posted media-bashing tweets most frequently (n = 874), likely to go along with his voter fraud claims. We then applied the same keywords to extract partisan influencers’ tweets from an existing project that applied a network sampling approach to identifying distinct clusters of users on Twitter based on their following network. We will apply time series analysis to test if the volume of tweets from traditional media and partisan influencers across the spectrum was driven by Trump’s media bashing tweets. We will also use automated text analysis techniques to identify the frames in their tweets.

Authors

• Rui Wang, University at Buffalo

• Yini Zhang