The Media’s Cycle of Churning Through Candidates, Trump Edition
Prop up a candidate, get bored of candidate, complain candidate is in decline, repeat.
For everything that might be wrong with large media outlets, there’s no escaping the control they wield over election cycles. They possess the power to crush White House dreams or make them a reality.
Which is part of why headlines like this are hilarious:
Yesterday, we discussed a report released by the Media Research Center that revealed CNN devoted a whopping 78% of its GOP primary coverage to Donald Trump. The skewed timeshare was reflected in the network’s GOP debate held Wednesday, the first 45 minutes of which were questions about their favorite subject — Donald Trump. The end game? Ratings. And it worked for CNN.
The cycle is relatively simple:
Obsessing over a candidate to the point of media saturation creates an inevitable amount of fatigue over the subject. Writing and talking about the same.exact.thing over and over and over again is tediously taxing, not to mention boring. Then there’s the consumer element. The public’s want of gossip, drama, scandal, and salaciousness only helps to fuel the cycle.
The Washington Post’s John Sides explored the correlation between media coverage of Trump and his ascension in the polls. The results are fascinating. There appears to be a direct connection to the amount of coverage Trump received and his poll standings.
Now, I’ll qualify this by saying that Trump has smartly harnessed the anti-Republican status quo dissatisfaction and used it to his advantage. That is a real phenomena that deserves credit. The rebellion against the old guard GOP certainly explains why those at the top of the Republican primary heap happen to be political outsiders. That being said, the media’s role in propelling him to the front of the pack is one that deserves serious consideration.
Sides findings pretty well speak for themselves:
After Carly Fiorina’s strong performance in Wednesday’s debate, the fever pitch has a new note. Naturally, articles like the Politico piece bemoan declining media coverage of their once favorite headline go-to. Somewhere in all of this, they completely miss the fact that this “declining coverage” is due solely to their own decision-making. It’s a cycle that verges on self-parody and one wholly within their control.
With 16 candidates running in one primary alone, there’s plenty of news to cover. Whether its lack of desire, interest, or ability, covering a larger portion of the candidate base more equitably is not part of the equation.
We’ll be bombarded with Carly stories until the next debate, or the next flub up, or the next gotcha, when Media Attention will once again shine its spotlight in another direction. And so the cycle will continue.
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Comments
You forgot the “suck the air out of the more viable conservative candidates” in that cycle. The media is trying to set up the only candidate that the democrats can beat in the next election (Bush).
Oh, PLEASE! Could a Deemocrat beat Christy? Kasick? Gimme a break!
No Donkey Party candidate can beat Trump. So there’s that.
With so many of his positions being so closely aligned to their’s, why would they feel the need?
You err.
http://www.ontheissues.org/donald_trump.htm
No, Unc. I listen and I read.
T-rump is a BIG GOVERNMENT Collectivist running under a false flag.
He tells you all them time, if you let him.
“There appears to be a direct connection to the amount of coverage Trump received and his poll standings.”
Fox Butterfield, is that you? LOL!
Oh, BTW: Trump has released his position paper on the 2nd Amendment. I like it a lot! (But I’m sure Jeb will be better, at least Karl Rove hopes so!)
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/second-amendment-rights
For all Jeb’s (many) faults, he did give us Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” & self-defense immunity laws. At about the same time that Trump was arguing in favor of assault weapon bans and increased waiting periods before law-abiding citizens were allowed to exercise their second amendment rights.
Jeb also gave us the Tenant Healthcare vampires.
“Jeb Bush left the Florida governor’s office in January of 2007, after eight years of service. Three months later, he joined the board of a hospital company that had been pillaging government health programs and abusing patients, in Florida and around the country, for most of the years he sat in the governor’s office.”
-snip-
“… but starting in 2002 and running on into 2007, the company faced allegations of fraud, Medicare false claims, patient abuse, overcharging federal health care programs, kickback violations, falsely inflating hospital charges, unnecessary heart operations, unnecessary patient deaths, and SEC violations. Again, the company bought its way out of these charges, paying around $1.7 billion to settle government investigations, government lawsuits, and private lawsuits.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/12/jeb_bush_and_tenet_healthcare_corp.html#ixzz3PiZa66q3
And Trump said government-run socialized medicine works great. But how did we even segue from second amendment issues to healthcare? Oh, right! You had no rational fact-based rebuttal to that one, so you frantically threw something completely unrelated out there in the hopes that no one would notice.
“Look, a squirrel!”
Who do you think wrote that position paper, because I’m damn sure it was NOT Duh Donald!?!?!
What were you so crazy about in the paper?
Was it the call to Federalize local policing and criminal prosecution? I thought conservatives were against that.
“But for those who are violent, a danger to themselves or others, we need to get them off the street before they can terrorize our communities. This is just common sense.”
Wul, duh. But that is one of the thorniest problems of the modern era, and T-rump has no flucking idea how to solve it. “We need real solutions to address real problems. Not grandstanding or political agendas.” Indeed.
The Forum format, like the Heritage forum held today, with one candidate at a time on the stage, is much better than an MSM debate for getting to know a candidate and their positions.
Each candidate gets to speak uninterrupted, and the questions are more substantive, not gotcha questions and the atmosphere is friendlier and more civilized.
My point was, that I’d like the MSM to have less input and interference in the selection of President of the USA.
Things would be better if we could REGULATE their coverage and tactics to prevent some of the feeding cycles and sound bites being spewed out by each pundit in turn that have been created, calculated and plotted by Soros, Murdoch and their colleagues.
One day, I counted 15 different pundits comparing Trump to George Wallace.
“The Forum format, like the Heritage forum held today, with one candidate at a time on the stage, is much better than an MSM debate for getting to know a candidate and their positions.
Each candidate gets to speak uninterrupted, and the questions are more substantive, not gotcha questions and the atmosphere is friendlier and more civilized.”
This is the one Trump was too scared to attend, right?
Bullseye!
BINGO. The ‘conservative’ Trump avoids a conservative event like the plague had been reported there.
Why would a conservative presidential candidate avoid a premier conservative event? Hmmmm.
All of the campaigns, and supporters, of fledgling candidates seem to be banking on this. You hear them say, “at this point in 2012, Herman Cain was the front runner”, and things like that…”Michelle Bachman was the front runner at this point…blah, blah”. I’m no professional, just a gal very involved in grass roots politics, and this election cycle is anything but 2012 or 2008. We are pissed!