Trump, Media, and Celebrity: Did the Press Fail?

• In Event: Making Sense of Election 2016: How the Media Mattered in the U.S. Presidential Election

Abstract

In the midst of a highly contentious and in many ways unprecedented presidential election, many journalists, commentators, and scholars bemoaned the way Donald Trump seemed to, as one recent scholarly piece phrased it, “drive the media to the nomination.” Several studies suggest that Trump successfully dominated headlines through his unconventional behavior and rhetoric, which, many have assumed, was correlated with his success during the 2016 Republican primaries and with the closeness of the general election race. In other words, many have accused (explicitly or implicitly) the mainstream media of failing in their watchdog duties.  While the circumstantial case is intriguing, several empirical questions need careful examination. In particular, what if the coverage of Trump was predominantly negative? Does the Trump-riding-the-media-to-victory theory still hold under that condition? If so, then we might need to set aside a great deal of academic writing resting on the notion that candidates need to win not just coverage, but positive coverage, in order to prevail (unless we are willing to concede the old adage that all press is essentially good press). Alternatively, even if the mainstream press did "fail," given fairly clear evidence that many Trump voters are the same voters who reject the legitimacy of the mainstream press, it is doubtful that his mainstream media coverage influenced his electoral success—except by reinforcing these voters’ notions about press bias and fueling Trump’s rise, in a dynamic similar to that recently documented in the return of Benyamin Netanyahu to power in Israel. This study examines mainstream media coverage of Donald Trump to assess the tone and framing of Trump news, and draws upon literature from the fields of popular culture and celebrity studies to suggest that Trump’s unconventional candidacy invites us to reexamine assumptions of mainstream political communication literature.

Authors

• Regina G. Lawrence, U of Oregon

• Amber Boydstun, U of california in Davis