Trump America, Part 1- The Media and Polarization

On Saturday I was watching Sean Spicer literally berate the media in his first press conference as Press Secretary, and the only thing I kept asking myself is "how the hell did this happen?" How did we reach a point where a White House Press Secretary thought this was acceptable? How did we reach a point where there are millions of people siding with him as he does this? The man was literally lying about the size of an inauguration crowd, something the National Park Service estimates, to a press corps that actually sat there and let him continue to talk. How?

This is an interesting question on two fronts- Donald Trump and the media. How did we get to Donald Trump's brand of politics winning a national election? How did we get to a point where this passes as media coverage? The story is quite complicated, so let me break it apart for you.

Consolidation and Expansion in Media Since the Civil War
In early America, politicians had to deal with a "gatekeeper" media. We didn't have television or the internet, or even radio for a time, so the only way to get news to the public was print media. It was also the only outlet to speak to the public through if you wanted to get out your message. The access that newsmakers needed was through the media, and not the other way around.

Of course the mediums of media have grown dramatically. Radio came along, and then television. Magazines and weeklies challenged newspapers. The internet came along and cut out a ton of overhead costs. News cycles shortened to the point where 24 hour news stations cover politics non-stop, and give lots and lots of options for a politician to choose from in their search for the right outlet to tell their story. The advantage shifted.

Access Driven Journalism
At one time, objectivity was the most important ethos in journalism. Now, to be clear, reporters were supposed to be fair and open minded in their reporting, but they could call bullshit actual bullshit. If a politician lied or said something demonstrably false, reporters called them on it. Now, both sides adhered to certain norms and fairness- FDR's health issues were left out of the press, as were JFK's infidelity issues, even though the press was tough on both for policy and political moves- but everyone respected that journalists could do their jobs.

Beginning with Richard Nixon, it became fashionable to attack the press at the core of their credibility. Now, to be fair, it was always done, but it was not always cast as a conspiracy to take down Presidents and political parties. Over the course of the 20th century, press access gradually degraded anyway, and suddenly reporters were the ones seeking the access- because there were more and more mediums by which to report news. Access became a competition, and that competition changed the way the media reported news entirely. The era of objectivity ended, because being objective meant sometimes being negative, and being transparently negative meant the possibility of losing some access. Given that media is a business, like anything else, losing access wasn't acceptable.

"Balance" Driven Media and the Death of Facts
If calling politicians out for their ridiculous statements wasn't the domain of reporters anymore (to be fair, columnists still do, but more on them in a minute), that fundamentally changed journalism. Reporters increasingly sought "balance." By "balance," I mean they essentially allowed both sides of a debate to be presented on equal footing in coverage, so as to not cause a rift with one side. This would be fine, but once politicians figured out that the press would print what they said in order to keep access, they realized they could say any damn thing. We saw this in the run up to Iraq. We see this in debates about policies every day, from Paul Ryan's budget not ever balancing (and no one questioning it), to Donald Trump continuing to claim Mexico would pay for his border fence throughout the campaign. If the press is going to give you a platform to make your case, whatever it may be, the incentive to be honest begins to die.

This is not to say that media hasn't tried to fact-check politicians. They've tried hard, actually. They've created countless fact-check sites and columns to report when elected officials lie to us. They have columnists and editorial board writings that constantly call out the most ridiculous of claims. The problem with these mediums being used to fact-check, instead of the actual news columns, is that the public who is consuming this news views it as opinion. Voters are correctly onto the fact that opinions are just that, and if they perceive fact checking politicians as news, it opens up the perception that facts are in fact, opinions.

The Rise of Opinion Driven Media
Just as fact-checking is being moved to the pages generally reserved for opinion columnists, opinion driven media rose up from the ashes of a dying media. On the conservative side, Fox News and AM talk radio provided a place to indoctrinate Republicans against the Democrats. On the Democratic side, a host of liberal magazines, from Slate and Salon to the netroots bloggers like Kos, and MSNBC on television, arose to tell Democrats what they wanted to hear. Again, if facts are opinions, then why can't I hear the facts I want to hear?

All of this produces a set of conditions that no one really saw coming a few decades ago. Politicians facing mainstream news sources are getting a pass on the news pages, ripped by "opinion" page writers for their lies, and then supported by a compliant "alternative" opinion media that suits their side of the argument. Now, to be fair, this phenomenon is much worse on the right than the left, though it's happening on both, but to be just as fair, that makes sense in the "anti-government" party.

Along Comes Donald Trump to Eradicate All Remaining Norms
Donald Trump is not normal, but he is the natural conclusion to this entire vicious cycle. If news reporters from the traditional, "mainstream" press are going to allow politicians to say any damn thing they want, and push the criticisms to the opinion columns, and our political parties are going to build sophisticated PR shops that pose as "media" to help further those narratives against the critics, then you are going to end up with a guy who literally says any damn thing he wants, thumbs his nose at the fact checkers, and simply takes his message directly to the public while demonizing the press.

Donald Trump has changed all the rules. Just a few obvious things that are now changed forever:

1. Candidates can take their message straight to the public, if they can build the social media following that he had.
2. Fact-checking organizations are dead.
3. "Balanced" reporting won't work any more, since we're now arguing over crowd sizes at inaugurations and the validity of CIA reports on Russian hacking.
4. Opinion columnists aren't reaching the median voters the way social media is, they are a mechanism of the educated, elite coasts.
5. Attacking the messenger essentially ends the discussion of the merits of the debate.

We're literally no longer all consuming the same basic facts, and when Kellyanne Conway tells Meet the Press that the White House Press Secretary is using "Alternative Facts," while that sounds ridiculous to us, it's literally not. It should be, but in the divided America that we are in, what she's saying actually has some ridiculous merit. Don't get me wrong, she's lying and so is he, but lying to the press is now a legitimate political act, because the conditions we've created say so. As more and more small town newspapers close, and the journalism industry continues to die it's slow death, our political news is increasingly entertainment, and decreasingly a conduit from the public to the truth and facts of our world. It is worth noting that there is absolutely no chance Trump fixes this, given his perfecting this broken system, but it's also worth noting that he's not the person who put us here. He's just the logical end point of a long march towards journalistic hell.