The Hybrid Media System

by Andrew Chadwick

  As Obama did in 2008, Trump himself built directly upon the mediated context he had already helped shape with his books. On June 14, 2015, standing in the lobby of Trump Tower on New York City’s Fifth Avenue to announce his candidacy, Trump said this:

  So I’ve watched the politicians. I’ve dealt with them all my life. If you can’t make a good deal with a politician, then there’s something wrong with you. You’re certainly not very good. And that’s what we have representing us. They will never make America great again. They don’t even have a chance. . . . Our country needs a truly great leader, and we need a truly great leader now. We need a leader that wrote The Art of the Deal. (Washington Post Staff, 2015)

  If Trump’s book franchise laid the foundations for his rise to political prominence, it did so, not as a set of isolated artifacts, but as part of a broader assemblage of broadcast media and the web. The most important vehicle here was the NBC television reality game show The Apprentice. Trump was the star of its first fourteen seasons from 2004 to 2015. The show’s format, with its weekly rituals of desperation, interrogation, and rejection, was contrived to position Trump as the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes success in the modern workplace, and society in general.

  Looking back at the mediation of the 2016 campaign, it is clear that The Apprentice was a decisive cultural and political force in the construction of Trump’s authority. This went far beyond the shtick of his infamous catch phrase, “You’re fired!” In the twenty-first century, the lines between work and private life have become increasingly blurred as work has come to play an important structuring role in everyday life. The workplace has become probably the nearest thing there is to an almost universally resonant public space in which we learn how leadership, authority, and power can decisively shape our fates. It should have come as no surprise, then, that Trump’s show would become a huge hit with audiences, nor that it would be important for the development of the “Trump-as-winner” brand. The norms and practices of the fictional workplace of The Apprentice served as condensed, exaggerated, and distorted versions of the norms and practices that animate workplace relations in the real world beyond “reality” TV. But, like most niche reality formats, ultimately the show worked because it held up a mirror to society at large (Franko, 2006: 250). It is thus important to consider the political work that The Apprentice did for premediating Trump’s run for the White House.

  In one sense, this is straightforward enough. In the words of Elizabeth Franko, The Apprentice was a “highly centralized dictatorship” (2006: 249). Trump was at its apex, dispensing advice to viewers straight down the barrel of the camera lens, meting out justice to desperately competitive participants who knew they must cooperate if they were to have any hope of surviving their manufactured (and often genuine) precariousness. In this world, the self-aggrandizing Trump always began as the winner and always ended up as the winner. Even when, at the end of a season, the final apprentice had been chosen, Trump still won, because the prize was a position running one of his companies. His status was unassailable and was presented as such due to his background and experience earned externally to the show, in the “real” world of business.

  All of this televisual work was reinforced by the show’s companion website. Sponsored by the American Management Association, it featured weekly hints and tips on how to improve one’s leadership skills. The spoils of Trump’s success were frequently on display. The conspicuous consumption and status symbols—the helicopter, the New York penthouse, the hotels, and the goods that participants were asked to sell, such as Trump-branded bottled water—all contributed to the profoundly inegalitarian symbolic structure. But the internal rules of the game were contrived to produce and reproduce this hierarchy.

  The second, less obvious, sense in which The Apprentice mattered for Trump’s campaign derives from one of the show’s most often-repeated tag lines: “It’s Not Personal, It’s Just Business.” The meaning of this phrase bears some scrutiny. It rests on a separation between ethics in the world of business and those that apply in our “personal” lives. In business, anything goes; any strategy to defeat your opponents is fair game, because, in another of the show’s catchphrases, “Winning Is Everything.” In personal life, different, more collaborative, solidaristic, and civil norms may apply, but these will only cloud judgment in the world of business, where competition, individualism, and incivility get results. This—the central moral narrative of a show that ran for more than a decade before Trump announced his candidacy—was a theme that recurred time and again throughout the primaries and the general election campaign. Trump traveled from rally to rally, televised debate to televised debate, personally insulting other candidates, journalists, celebrities, and protestors; settling scores and stoking professional media coverage with an extraordinary litany of “politically incorrect” exaggerations, half-truths, distortions, and lies about others and his own record.2

  The Apprentice’s moral code of “It’s Not Personal, It’s Just Business” became the force behind much of Trump’s behavior during the campaign. It spurred his continuous violations of so many of the established civic norms of election campaigning. This presented professional journalists with an acute dilemma. How should they report on a candidate who was willing to trample on so many established expectations about how politicians were supposed to behave?

  Seriously, Literally, or Both? Exploiting the Dilemmas of Journalistic Hybridity

  The driving moral code of Trump’s vituperative campaigning style, “It’s Not Personal, It’s Just Business,” is key to understanding Trump’s exploitation of the dilemmas of contemporary journalism.

  On September 23, 2016, with election day looming, the Atlantic magazine published a short article entitled “Taking Trump Seriously, Not Literally.” Part promotion for Trump, part reflection on the role of fact-checking in journalism, the piece was written by Salena Zito, a reporter and former Republican presidential campaign worker. Zito argued that journalists had failed to understand why Trump had won the Republican nomination and was now a contender for the presidency. When Trump made racist, sexist, or xenophobic remarks, exaggerated claims or massaged statistical evidence, elite media had treated him either as an amateur to be ridiculed, or had responded with manufactured outrage that further fueled Trump’s publicity-hungry campaign and its theme that elite media were biased. This was a disturbing analysis that sent shock waves through professional media organizations. The “seriously, not literally” analytical couplet became a major theme of the closing weeks of the campaign.

  Trump’s strategy was to prime attention to issues that he thought might grow his electoral base and resonate with the social groups that post-election analyses showed were essential to his success: older, white, working-class voters in the small towns and cities of the Rust Belt in Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, and western Pennsylvania (Pacewicz, 2016). If this meant speeches based on racial slurs against Mexican immigrants, mysogynistic attacks on women journalists, a constant rejection of “political correctness,” and going beyond the realm of “the facts,” then he saw that as a price worth paying.3 The response from elite journalism was to fact-check and highlight Trump’s illiberalism with headlines full of outrage—in other words, exactly the kind of coverage that a right-wing, insurgent candidate requires if he is to build a viable electoral coalition by reaching out to supporters not traditionally aligned with the Republicans. And this was exactly the kind of coverage that would galvanize that support by constantly showing elite media for what he believed they were: “coastal liberals” who did not understand “middle America.” Central to this goal was a media strategy that ruthlessly, and perfectly rationally, exploited the systemic interdependence between older and newer media.

  Trumping Professional Media

  In my analysis of the 2008 U.S. election (chapter 7), I showed that a central force in shaping the contemporary campaign is the real space-internet-television nexus. Contrary to predictions that digital media would come to d
isplace television as the most important campaign medium, instead there has been a growing systemic interdependence between television and digital media. This context encompasses the now-classic campaign media events, such as live televised candidate debates, scheduled set-piece interviews, and press conferences. Yet layered into this context of mediation, interacting with it at all times, is physical spectacle.

  Physical spectacle continues to matter a great deal for how campaigns are mediated. Campaigns now rely on a combination of digital media, television, and particular formations of physical space: the inescapably material, embodied, and geographically proximate experiences of rallies, marches, town hall meetings, and staged campaign gatherings. Often theatrical, these campaign events remain essential to projecting a candidate to the public and to journalists. They are a means of attracting broadcast and print coverage because journalists crave symbols that visibly convey the political drama as it unfolds, such as displays of enthusiasm, candidate and activist authenticity, and the momentum that builds around the performance of heroic individuals (Alexander, 2010; Mast, 2016). Rallies and marches provide partisans and activists with resources, such as status updates, photos, and video clips, that they can distribute in their interpersonal networks. For campaign managers, events also provide opportunities to use digital media, particularly email and social media platforms, to gather information that may be used to mobilize supporters during the remainder of a campaign.

  The Trump campaign exploited, but also partly reconfigured, the real space-internet-television nexus. Central to this process was Trump’s staggering level of social media visibility. In this he far outpaced Hillary Clinton, not only in numbers of followers, but also in the social media engagement metrics that reveal the extent to which the American public now uses social media to follow politics. By the close of the campaign, Trump had 12 million followers of his Facebook account, 12.9 million Twitter followers, and 2.92 million Instagram followers. Clinton bowed out with 7.9 million Facebook followers, 10.2 million Twitter followers, and 2.93 million Instagram followers (Meyer, 2016). Trump clearly had the edge, but these basic numbers do not tell the whole story. For that we need to consider engagement metrics: comments, shares, likes, Facebook “reactions,” and retweets. We need to consider how these made a difference and why there was such a gap between Clinton and Trump.

  METRICS OF ENGAGEMENT

  In the late 2000s, social media companies began to generate revenue by opening up their platforms to advertisers. They soon realized that they needed reasonably clear and intuitive ways of measuring how individuals interacted with the content they found in their news feeds and streams. Just as important, social media companies needed to encourage users to spend more time on their sites, so they could demonstrate to advertisers that users were devoting attention to advertisements. This partly accounts for the introduction of click monitoring, likes, shares, and retweets.

  Metrics such as these are basic, and I am not arguing that they can be used to make inferences about public opinion. But they have clearly become reasonably stable artifacts and products for which brands, celebrities, and candidates will now pay. These data allow us to draw some comparisons between candidates and augment the complex mix of variables that determine the success or failure of a campaign strategy.

  With this in mind, how did Trump’s and Clinton’s social media engagement levels compare? What emerges is a stark picture of Trump’s engagement advantage. From January 1, 2016, to November 6, 2016, on Facebook, Trump’s posts racked up a total of 208.1 million likes, comments, and shares (Meyer, 2016). In contrast, Clinton’s gathered only 72 million. During the same period on Instagram, Trump’s posts received 53 million likes and comments, while Clinton’s received 31 million. On Twitter, the platform to which journalists flock for sourcing their stories, the engagement gap was larger still: Trump’s 89.5 million likes and retweets dwarfed Clinton’s 41.6 million.

  Of course, these simple metrics tell us nothing about the content of what was shared or how different types of content were related to levels of engagement. At the time of this writing, we do not know the proportion of Trump’s engagement metrics that came from liberals circulating his posts in order to share their outrage at his opinions, for example. But most salient here is how the social media engagement gap enables a candidate to exert greater agency in the broader media system than his or her opponents. What kinds of media-systemic advantages now accrue to those who can open up such a decisive lead? Answering this question requires sensitivity to the context of the 2016 race and attention to three essential forces: recognition, credibility, and momentum.

  RECOGNITION, CREDIBILITY, AND MOMENTUM: SOCIAL MEDIA DRIVE TRADITIONAL MEDIA COVERAGE

  Trump was an insurgent candidate and was not part of the Republican establishment. He had celebrity capital but very little political capital. To translate his celebrity capital into political capital and go on to build support, he required coverage—of any valence—by professional media, particularly in the early stages of the Republican primaries, but also throughout the entire campaign. He had to demonstrate to editorial gatekeepers and political reporters at the nation’s most respected media organizations that he was a contender for the Republican nomination and that he could rival Clinton in the general election.

  For journalists eager to report on the drama of a campaign, social media metrics matter (Anderson, 2013). Due to the large numbers of Americans that use social media platforms on a daily basis, metrics are often used as proxies for the levels of interest that a candidate is generating among the public. Metrics now have a place in newsrooms, alongside opinion polls and forecasting. In 2016, social media logic thus jelled perfectly with older mass media organizational logic. The result was always likely to be greater publicity for an insurgent, as journalists went hunting for high-impact tweets that they could embed in their news articles—with the numbers of retweets, likes, and replies all prominently displayed.

  But what about the thorny issue of content, particularly the proportion of the social media engagement that was critical of Trump? “There is no such thing as bad publicity” is such an awful cliché that it almost gives me physical pain to write the words. But again, context is everything here. In a media system in which countless acts of engagement occur every second, there are some fields of activity where the specific intent or valence of an act of engagement might not matter as much as how those acts combine to produce sheer mass and ubiquity. Trump’s challenge was to get a foothold in the race and to continue to convert his celebrity capital into political capital by attracting further “serious” political coverage. Social media were crucial in overcoming this challenge.

  Trump’s campaign was therefore an intensified and distorted version of the model that had been used by Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. During the early stages of the race (but not the later stages, as I shall discuss in the following), what Trump lacked in targeted advertising and data-driven campaigning at the precinct level he made up for in social media engagement that caught journalists’ attention. Obama’s campaigns went far beyond the mere generation of metrics-as-proxies; they empowered large numbers of activists to become involved in direct interactions with the electorate. For Trump, as for Obama, online supporters formed an essential component of the campaign assemblage. But Trump prioritized a “purer” social media strategy. He personally tweeted and updated his Facebook page with fresh content that he knew would be circulated by supporters and opponents alike. Aside from the recognition benefits that would accrue from the horizontal sharing of his opinions in the interpersonal networks of his followers, this approach enabled Trump to demonstrate his impact to journalists. Journalists, in turn, provided him with the credibility and recognition he needed to reach the broader public, including all-important independent and switch voters in swing states. The regularity and timeliness with which Trump intervened on social media contributed greatly to the momentum that is such an important long-term resource in the brutally drawn-out
American campaign. It is also important to bear in mind that Trump’s Twitter following had been built up during his days on The Apprentice, and it is clear that he had learned a great deal about what works in the celebrity-infested waters of this platform. Trump’s aggressive tweeting patterns had become well-known to his followers, and they were an essential part of his television persona.

  During the campaign, Trump tweeted at times of the day that were deliberately calculated to have the greatest possible influence on newsroom editorial meetings across the country. He was also more likely than Clinton to post links to news articles (Enli, 2017). In a world where most politicians have decided to control their online personas and devolve social media work to their staff, it was obvious that Trump posted many (though not all) of his own tweets. The fact that these messages often included spelling errors, uppercase SHOUTING, and exclamation points (BAD! Sad!) only added to the construction of Trump as an authentic, “ordinary” guy. As Gunn Enli’s (2017) analysis of Trump’s and Clinton’s tweets has shown, this “amateur” rhetorical style was present in 54.5 percent of Trump’s tweets but only 12.9 percent of Clinton’s. This development reflects a broader, and growing, affinity among elite political actors for the conversational and informal discourse that is prevalent in social media environments. It is a further installment in the growth of a new style of campaigning that now coexists alongside the highly controlled discursive style of the “professionalized” model that was dominant at the height of the broadcast era (Chadwick, 2006: 144–176). Trump’s social media campaign rudely and unexpectedly spoke to several of the pathologies of scholarly research on the internet and campaigns. Scholars have long asked: Why are politicians so inauthentic and robotic online? Why are they so controlled, remote, and unengaging? Why do they not say what they really think and engage with voters? (Chadwick, 2006: 144–176; Vaccari, 2013).