That same day, January 21, Donald Trump was scheduled to make a speech to staff at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, just outside Washington. Overnight, he had discussed media reports of the size of the inauguration crowd with Sean Spicer (Prokop, 2017). Trump had instructed Spicer to convene a White House press briefing to deal with the issue. The goal was to present the crowd photos as misinformation and fabrication by hostile journalists. To prime the news agenda while speaking to the CIA, Trump pointedly remarked on the size of his inauguration crowds and went into considerable digressive detail about how journalists had got it all wrong. Trump claimed that there were a “million, million and a half people” on the Mall (Lee, 2017). The scene was set for Spicer’s press briefing later that afternoon.
But as Trump was speaking to the CIA, Women’s March protestors were already flooding the National Mall and the surrounding streets, for the Washington node of a global event. The march as a whole turned out to be the largest single-day protest in U.S. history. An estimated 4.8 million people took part, 3.5 million of them in the United States (Tufecki, 2017).1 In Washington alone, an estimated 470,000 took to the streets (Wallace & Parlapiano, 2017). Marches took place in all major U.S. cities, with particularly large crowds in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, and Seattle, though many smaller cities and towns across the country saw protests as well. Marches also happened in eighty-one other countries. Just as significant were the huge volumes of social media posts about the marches. Many of these included photos of the crowded Washington subway and streets and drew direct comparisons with the size of the crowds for the previous day’s inauguration. And these were remediated in articles that aggregated and embedded the tweets on high-traffic news sites, including Buzzfeed (Gallucci, 2017; Reinstein, 2017).
Later that afternoon, Spicer gave the very first White House press briefing of the Trump era. Before a room of elite reporters from U.S. media organizations, he accused journalists of “deliberately false reporting.” He proceeded to read out a five-minute statement that disputed the veracity of the photos of the crowds on the National Mall. He argued that media organizations were aiming to “lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration” by downplaying what he said was the real size of the inauguration crowd. He mobilized a range of evidence for his case—that the floor coverings that were used “for the first time in our nation’s history” to cover the lawned areas had “the effect of highlighting any areas where people were not standing” and that the DC Metro had reported “420,000 people using public transit,” compared with only “317,000” who had used it for Obama’s 2013 inauguration. Spicer concluded that “[t]his was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration—period—both in person and around the globe” (Kessler, 2017). Without taking questions and without mentioning the Women’s March, Spicer walked out of the room.
Spicer’s press conference came at the end of a long campaign that saw Trump repeatedly attack professional media for their unfavorable coverage and their failure to report the size of the crowds attending his rallies (Prokop, 2017). But Spicer’s first White House event left professional media organizations shell-shocked. Here was the new administration—in its very first opportunity to engage media—accusing journalists of essentially fabricating the claim that Trump’s inauguration crowd was smaller than Obama’s, despite clear photographic evidence to the contrary.
But Spicer’s intervention was, in many respects, based on the norms of a previous era, when scripted and staged press conferences, designed for a select group of elite broadcast and newspaper journalists, were a relatively quick and easy method to reclaim the agenda during a news cycle. Indeed, such events were often used to initiate such cycles. Does this kind of action have the same purchase in a media system that is characterized by political information cycles: news-making assemblages that include many non-elite participants, who interact online to contest official news frames or advance their own frames, in real-time exchanges?
Journalists soon began to use Twitter to spread the news about Spicer’s accusations that they had under-reported the size of the inauguration crowds. CNN and CBS, for example, uploaded video of the press conference and embedded short clips in their Twitter streams (CBS News, 2017; CNN Politics, 2017).
Meanwhile, the first reports of the global Women’s March were appearing on news organization websites and television. The crowds were clearly enormous. Spicer’s problem had not gone away. Indeed, his attempt to solve it had made things worse. Photographs and videos of the Washington march, broadcast on cable news channels, embedded on channel websites and YouTube, and pushed out via social media accounts, revealed that the protests had attracted greater numbers than the inauguration. The stage was set for a mediated struggle between the new administration and its opponents. The size of these three crowds—Obama’s in 2009, Trump’s in 2017, and those for the Women’s March—in other words, the extent of the physical, embodied opposition to Trump in proximate form and recorded historical memory, became the central point of contestation. This was a counter-inauguration.
The Women’s March was a tangible, visible, and literally massive manifestation of the opposition to Trump. In this sense it played a role similar to the huge rallies organized by Obama’s staff during the 2008 presidential campaign, which were aimed at augmenting the social solidarity of supporters previously only united by their online social network ties, and demonstrating a show of strength to both local and national media (see chapter 7). Like the story of the fake cake, the struggle to define the meaning and significance of the 2017 inauguration crowd played out through a process best described as memetic metaphor-claiming. Who owned the right to draw conclusions about the size and meaning of the crowds? This process involved multiple actors, interacting with each other in interdependent power relations in an assemblage of older and newer media, and in full view of the public. Trump and his staff clearly saw this as a high-stakes encounter that might set the tone for their opening weeks in office. Their task was given greater urgency by the new president’s approval ratings, which, at 42 percent, were the lowest ever recorded for an incoming president (RealClearPolitics, 2017).
Next, reeling from their treatment at Spicer’s press meeting, editors at the Washington Post commissioned their veteran political reporter, Glenn Kessler, who was now in charge of the paper’s Fact Checker section, to write an extended piece evaluating Spicer’s claims. As I argued in chapter 8, fact-checking has become an important form of hybrid journalism (see also Graves, 2016). It is a means by which older media have responded to the acceleration of the news cycle and the rise of multiple, alternative news producers, many of which rely on the aggregation and recirculation of material published elsewhere rather than the independent production of their own stories. However, the rapid-fire fact-checking of today is not a simple restatement of the older values of investigative journalism. Instead, it takes acceleration, hypercompetition, and the availability of a multiplicity of sources as its foundation, while trying to position a news organization as a responsive yet authoritative debunker of official claims and a driver of the news agenda. In short, fact-checking’s attraction to a cash-starved news industry is that it can now be assembled quickly and relatively cheaply, often from online fragments of information, such as tweets and charts from government reports. But it still enables journalists to become authoritative anchors in the sea of uncertainty that usually washes around a political scandal, a media event, or a decisive period of partisan conflict.
Kessler’s Fact Checker article for the Washington Post appeared on Sunday, the morning after Spicer’s press conference and two days after the inauguration (Kessler, 2017). It was an extraordinary piece of integrative journalism, notable for its fusion of traditional investigative judgment, eyewitness accounts, and expert testimony. Kessler gathered material from a variety of journalists on the ground and embedded their tweets, some of which featured photos that had been taken four years earlier. He marshaled evidence from computer scientists who had
used specially developed software to estimate the size of the crowd in the images provided by Reuters. Kessler pointed out that, due to the left-leaning character of the Washington area, there was never much likelihood that Trump would draw a crowd larger than the estimated 1.8 million who turned out for Obama in 2009.
Kessler then proceeded to demolish every other claim made by Trump and Spicer. The floor coverings on the Mall were not, in fact, new but had been used in 2013 for Obama’s second inauguration. A photo taken in 2013 by CNN journalist Ashley Killough showed this to be the case. Trump’s crowd did not extend past 10th Street. Photo tweets from PBS’s Lisa Desjardins and a post from a Washington Post video editor, Gillian Brockell, proved this. Kessler cited a New York Times article featuring UK-based computer scientists Marcel Altenburg and Keith Still, who specialize in algorithmic analysis of large crowd photography as part of their work for police and event planners (Wallace & Parlapiano, 2017). Altenburg and Still estimated that the Women’s March on the Mall had drawn three times as many people as Trump’s inauguration. Spicer’s claim that more people had used the DC Metro for Trump’s inauguration was also false. Both of Obama’s inaugurations saw larger numbers use the Metro and the 2009 event saw 1.1 million trips—the busiest single day in the DC public transport system’s history. And, in a final blow, Kessler pointed out that the second biggest day in the Metro’s history was the day of the Women’s March, when there were almost twice as many transit rides as there had been on Trump’s inauguration day.
When, later that Sunday evening, Trump’s senior adviser and campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, appeared on NBC’s flagship political discussion show, Meet the Press, she stated that Spicer had merely used “alternative facts” to describe the inauguration. Conway’s remark was met with incredulity by the show’s presenter, Chuck Todd, who replied, “Alternative facts are not facts. They are falsehoods” (Blake, 2017). By then, it was clear that the administration’s attempt to discredit journalists had failed.
In a period of just two days, the meaning of the inauguration had shifted. Such ceremonial events usually provide a straightforward opportunity for a new administration to present itself in the best possible light. But this inauguration became highly contested and will be remembered as such for generations. How and why this came to be the case is explained by the complex interdependencies of the hybrid media system. Trump’s belligerent insistence that reporters were fabricating evidence to discredit his reputation met with resistance—with counter-power expressed as the counter-inauguration. The counter-inauguration was an assemblage of older and newer media technologies, genres, norms, behaviors, and organizational forms; an emergent but decisively integrated confluence of politicians, professional political staff, journalists, citizen activists assembled as crowds, NGOs, online political communities, mobile devices, social media platforms, websites, television shows, and sporadically engaged members of the public. Crucially, the assemblage also included the highly connected global networks of people who participated in the Women’s Marches in more than eighty countries across the world. These geographically distant others were brought into close temporal proximity to the events in Washington by the affordances and uses of mobile digital media hardware and software. This enabled them to become simultaneously a force, acting in real time, on the events in Washington, as well as on how those events were being mediated across the United States and the world. The highly global character of this assemblage, made manifest by the distant crowds’ self-mediation via social media, was important in generating real-time solidarity, enthusiasm, and momentum for those engaged in the marches in Washington and across the United States. Through their acts of self-mediation and the remediation of these acts by journalists, these distant crowds were, in effect, pulled in to the center of the location that mattered—the National Mall. Here, they became important ancillary evidence of the extent of the opposition to Trump, and, in turn, they reinforced and enhanced the capacity and momentum of those in Washington eager to embarrass the president with a show of strength for the cause of women’s rights.
In a similar virtuous circle of mediation, the size of the Women’s Marches also spurred on journalists, whose news values were always likely to require that they show their audiences the sheer size of the crowds. After all, it was the resources of professional journalism—Lucas Jackson’s photo from the Washington Monument and Reuters’ news article comparing the 2009 and 2017 crowds—that contributed to the very possibility the inauguration might be interpreted as a failure for Trump. The marchers capitalized on this framing, but literally democratized and distributed its agency, by becoming an embodied, physical manifestation: a show of strength greater than Trump’s supporters could assemble. All the while, the marchers acted in the knowledge that their physicality would, in turn, be mediated by those same journalists—the ones who were looking to mobilize and represent the Marches’ actions in ways that demonstrated the same flawed Trump logic they were seeking to expose in their fact-checking articles about the inauguration. These actors cooperated and competed to develop webs of meaning that would create the conditions for exercising power. These were the resources that enabled the power to define what the inauguration would come to symbolize.
Spicer did not solve his problem.
These two stories from the counter-inauguration come from what should have been the apotheosis of Trump’s presidential campaign. This should have been a period of discipline and control. Instead, it was characterized by disorganization, contestation, and chaos. It signaled the new administration’s potential fragility in the face of the systemic interdependence between elite political and bureaucratic resources, journalistic counter-framing, and digitally enabled, activist counter-power—the forces that, as we have seen, now shape so much of how politics unfolds.
This was a fitting end to an election that will rightly engage an entire generation of scholars eager to make sense of the role of media in Trump’s rise from rank outsider to Republican primary nominee and eventual victor. In the remainder of this chapter I analyze what I consider to be the key episodes of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. I show how the hybrid media system approach can make sense of the campaign and assess the extent to which 2016 marked not only an intensification but also a rebalancing of the hybrid media campaigning that proved so decisive in the rise of Barack Obama.
Premediating Trump: From The Art of the Deal to The Apprentice
The historical context for understanding the mediation of Trump during the 2016 campaign is his autobiographical memoir and business self-help manual, The Art of the Deal. Published in 1987 and ghostwritten by journalist Tony Schwartz, the book was a million-copy bestseller that effectively launched Trump’s career as a celebrity capitalist. In the late 1980s, just as the neoliberal, deregulatory shift in Western economic policy was loosening political control over the banks and the financial system, the proliferation of cable and satellite television was also fragmenting public communication, offering new opportunities for those with the right resources to construct and project a persona based on aspirational lifestyle norms and the entrepreneurial “American dream.” Trump benefited from, and contributed much toward, the success and popularization of both of these historical shifts.
The Art of the Deal was important for its construction of Trump as a pugilistic, entertaining risk-taker and, perhaps most crucially, a “winner” whose approach to life and business demonstrably got results. Yet, as Todd Gitlin has shown, the book also punctuated an earlier period, during which Trump, to promote his persona, had interacted on a regular basis with journalists and editors at the major U.S. tabloids, particularly the New York Post and the Daily News (Gitlin, 2017).
The Art of the Deal paved the way for a truckload of similar books to roll through the 1990s and 2000s, culminating in a book that had a major influence on the themes of Trump’s run for office: 2011’s Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again. Although it did not attract much attention from news organizations at the
time, this book’s many policy recommendations—from taxing China “to save American jobs” to restricting immigration and repealing the Obama administration’s healthcare reforms—were the foundation of many of Trump’s 2016 rally speeches.
Trump’s hybrid autobiography–self-help book franchise is further evidence of the importance of what Richard Grusin has termed “premediation”: “the cultural desire to make sure that the future has already been pre-mediated before it turns into the present (or the past)” (Grusin, 2010: 4). As I argued in chapter 7, Obama’s historic success in the 2008 campaign was premediated by his bestselling autobiographies Dreams from My Father (1995) and The Audacity of Hope (2006). But Trump took this heroic narrative approach to new heights—or depths, depending on your taste. By 2016, he had meticulously packaged up his life story and business lessons into bite-sized chunks of wisdom, complete with online to-do lists on his website for the time-pressed, aspiring entrepreneur.
Thus, as the 2015 primary season got underway, Trump’s books were ready to be mined by journalists looking for a steady stream of anecdotes about the candidate’s behavior and attitudes. Long before his political ambitions became clear, Trump’s persona had been sensational enough to warrant front-page coverage. But once he announced his candidacy, the floodgates opened. During the course of the campaign, dozens of high-profile news articles emerged that combined fragments from the book franchise, quotes from magazine interviews, tidbits from celebrity gossip columns, and quotes from Trump’s campaign statements (for a good example of the genre, see Mayer, 2016). The fact that so many of Trump’s views and habits were already in the public domain before he decided to run for office proved irresistible to journalists eager for a hook—a salacious tale of vulgar excess here, a moment of psychological transgression there—that would spice up their campaign coverage and reach more readers in a media system that had become even more competitive since 2008.
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