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Trump Wins? In First Debate, We Need Corporate Media To Play Hardball

Trump Wins? In First Debate, We Need Corporate Media To Play Hardball

Apparently pretty much everyone I know is a bed-wetter.

The term gained currency in politics in January 2010 when Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, David Plouffe, in a Washington Post opinion piece[3] titled “November doesn’t need to be a nightmare for Democrats,” gave this advice to his party: “No bed-wetting.” “Instead of fearing what may happen,” he wrote, “let’s fight like hell.”

He could have gone with the blander, “No hand-wringing,” which wouldn’t have risked offending enuresis sufferers. But “bed-wetting” got traction in the American political lexicon – even though, as it turned out, Republicans picked up 63 seats in the House that November and recaptured the majority, a nightmare that retroactively warranted plenty of dread about nocturnal incontinence.

Plouffe was back at it during this summer’s Democratic Convention. “No bed-wetting,” he tweeted. “Clinton will enter August with strong electoral college advantage.” But that lead has since been blown, and now my in-box is positively leaking anxiety.

Tell me Trump won’t win, my friends are emailing. It’s a slow-motion train wreck, they’re saying, and I feel helpless to stop it. Why is the media letting Trump get away with it? I wouldn’t be so nervous if it weren’t for Gary Johnson; if it weren’t for millennial apathy, for alt-right propaganda, for Paul Ryan’s cowardice; if it weren’t for sexism, racism, infotainment, Idiocracy, plutocracy, Citizens United, voter suppression…. Help!

Now comes the first debate, adding fresh impetus to stock up on mattress pads. Yet no matter what Clinton does, the Trump-wins-first-debate narrative has already been written:

– Trump and Clinton will share the same stage. He is not a normal candidate, or even a normal person. She is. No matter what happens during the debate, it is declared afterward that the one-on-one matchup has “normalized” Trump. So Trump wins.

– Because the bar for a successful Trump performance has been set so low, when Trump fails to threaten to punch Clinton, it is acclaimed as evidence of his presidential temperament and general election pivot.  Trump wins.

– Trump will attack Clinton. Clinton will defend herself. The verdict: Trump was strong; Clinton was on the defensive. But people want strength. Trump wins.

– The moderator, NBC’s Lester Holt, will call Trump on a lie. Trump will heap scorn on Holt, NBC, MSNBC, the Commission on Presidential Debates and the corrupt, dishonest media. Gallup says public trust in the media is now at an all-time low. People will love Trump’s attack on Holt. Trump wins.

– Clinton will nail Trump for lying. He’ll lie so much, she won’t be able to keep up with him. Fact-checkers will say, after the fact, that his pants were on fire, but it won’t matter. The debate will be scored for entertainment value, not truth-value. Clinton’s zingers will be called scripted. Trump’s taunts will be so uncivil, so beyond the political pale, so viciously funny, he will be crowned the change candidate in a change election year. Trump wins.

– Trump and Clinton will go after each other so relentlessly that the debate will be called a draw. But the Beltway consensus is that Clinton needs to win; Trump just needs to tie. So a tie is a win. Trump wins.

Even if Clinton wipes the floor with Trump, the media’s inherent bias is for suspense. The media business model requires capturing and keeping the audience’s attention, so corporations can sell our eyeballs to advertisers. It doesn’t matter how the debates go, or what the polls say; the press will portray the final stretch of this horserace as neck and neck, a photo finish, you won’t want to miss this, stay tuned.

Four years ago, I predicted that Romney would win the first debate. For this clairvoyance, a colleague dubbed me “a Jewish prophet.” I wish I could take credit for knowing that Obama would grudgingly phone in his performance, but all I did was deduce what good storytelling required the first debate and its aftermath to be: a rout, followed by a comeback. Trump’s campaign has signaled that he’s doing minimal prep for the debate. Maybe this is garden-variety expectation lowering, but even if he bombs, no media narrative will cover the last six weeks of the campaign as anything but a nail-biter.

If worrying that Trump can win this election makes me a bed-wetter, too, I cop to it. What could turn the race around? It’d help if the press didn’t make the same mistake over and over. Last Friday, when Trump conned the networks into turning what was billed as a press conference about Obama’s birthplace into a half-hour live broadcast of veterans’ testimonials for Trump and an infomercial for his new hotel, CNN’s John King admitted on air, “We got played again by the Trump campaign, which is what they do.” No doubt Trump’s base loved that humiliation. But will the press ever learn? By the time the media figures out that its addiction to BREAKING NEWS is a standing invitation to be punked, the guy who’s gaming them may be sitting in the Oval Office.

I do see signs that Trump’s press bullying is losing octane. The Los Angeles Times’ lead story out of that birther event was headlined, “Trump trades one falsehood for two more,” and the New York Times led with “Trump Gives Up a Lie But Refuses to Repent.” If cable news covers the debates that unflinchingly, maybe Bed Bath & Beyond can let its inventory of waterproof bedding dwindle.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet. Marty Kaplan is the Norman Lear professor of entertainment, media and society at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Reach him at martyk@jewishjournal.com.

IMAGE: Republican U.S. presidential candidate Trump shows off the size of his hands as Fox News Channel moderators Bret Baier and Megyn Kelly look on at the U.S. Republican presidential candidates debate in Detroit on March 3, 2016.

The Definitive List: Who Deserves Blame For The Nomination Of Donald Trump?

The Definitive List: Who Deserves Blame For The Nomination Of Donald Trump?

This week, the Republican Party wrapped itself in the white flag.

Donald Trump has won enough delegates to to guarantee that he will clinch the GOP nomination. And one of his fiercest opponents, Marco Rubio, cozied up to him, almost begging for a chance to speak at the GOP convention — even after Trump attacked the party’s most prominent Latina.

While a few stray #NeverTrumpers can be heard in the distance, complaining that the self-proclaimed billionaire “makes George Wallace look like Churchill” and vowing to never ever vote for a candidate who is the choice of pretty much any strutting online anti-Semite you can find, resistance is futile.

The GOP is now officially Trump’s party. Yet at the same time, “Very Serious People” want us to absolve the GOP for delivering us a candidate whose great public accomplishments include getting rid of the talent portion of beauty pageants, using racism to undermine America’s first black president, and winning a major party’s nomination by vowing to ban 1.6 billion people from entering the country.

Bloomberg’s Megan McArdle tells us not to blame the Republican party for Trump, rejecting the notion that this insecure conman is a “monster that Republican leaders created” and now “broken free of its chains and was hell bent on destroying its former master.”

McArdle seems to reject the notion that conservatives should be responsible for the ideas they’ve advanced over the past 50 years, because voters ultimately ignored the “horrified pleading of conservative leaders and intellectuals” and backed Trump anyway. As if a few months of caution from the “establishment,” which conservatives have been training primary voters to reject since the inception of the movement, was supposed to be more effective than generations of feeding voters carefully coded messages designed to stir up racial and religious resentment.

We know Republicans are responsible for Trump, because you can be assured they’ll take credit for him if he wins. So here’s a quick review of who deserves the most blame.

  1. Republican voters.
    Trump hasn’t expanded the Republican Party — he has exposed it. Almost no who hadn’t been voting Republican for decades showed up to back Trump in the primary. In times past these Republican-leaning voters sat out the primaries and let the party activists decide whom they would back. Very Serious People caution against suggesting that anyone who backs Trump is bigoted. Economic issues are motivating them, we’re told — even though they tend to be richer than the rest of America and consumers in general are about as confident in the economy now as they were before the recession. If you believe in personal responsibility, you must acknowledge that Trump voters are at least tolerant of bigotry in pursuit of whatever they think he’s promising.
  2. The Republican Party
    McArdle rejects the notion that with the Southern strategy, the GOP “cynically decided to go after the South’s angry white racist vote.” She suggests that it was a logical if opportunistic approach to rising crime in America — that just happened to abandon the black vote for generations. But the Republican National Committee’s chairman admitted the underlying racism of its approach in 2005, back when the party was still trying to expand its base. “Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization,” Ken Mehlman said in 2005. “I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.” Trump’s constant lying and self-revision appear as “honest” to the GOP base, because he says aloud the same things that the party has been hinting and dog-whistling for generations. And the base had been primed to elect someone with no record of or inclination toward public service. “Normally voters might oppose Trump as flat-out unqualified for the job, both by lack of relevant experience and lack of knowledge of government and public affairs,” Jonathan Bernstein responded to his Bloomberg colleague. “But by giving a megaphone to people like Pat Robertson, Herman Cain, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina, Republicans showed their voters what counts as a ‘normal’ Republican presidential candidate — and it isn’t all that different from Donald Trump.”
  3. Fox News and “the media.”
    Trump has no actual credentials to be taken seriously as a candidate for president. But he had the most important credential to be taken seriously as a conservative — an open invitation to appear on Fox News. You can argue that the most popular news channel in the United States took a hostile view of his early candidacy. He was never denied a chance to show up on the channel for more than a few days, however — despite launching what the channel called “an endless barrage of crude and sexist verbal assaults” against its biggest female star. Now it has all but become an informercial for Trump, with the occasional appeals to sanity from Chris Wallace. Trump had been trying to be taken seriously as a presidential candidate for decades; before the 2000 election he got so serious about his possible Reform Party run that he withheld alimony from his ex-wife when she threatened his ambitions. Birtherism made him a conservative hero and when Fox News gave him a platform for this baldly racist attack on Obama, the network trained conservatives to take him and his outrageous conspiracy claim seriously (which may be why many still believe it today). The remaining media haven’t been much better. You are more likely to see an empty Trump podium on CNN waiting to be graced by our Putin with a weave, than a speech from Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. The media legitimize Trump by ignoring his complete lack of policy knowledge, constant mendacity and refusal to release his tax returns. And no interviewer even dares ask about his birtherism now for a simple reason: Mr. Trump doesn’t want to talk about it.
  4. Mitt Romney
    The last Republican nominee for president is one of the few noble #NeverTrumpers who remain steadfast. Why? “I wanted my grandkids to see that I simply couldn’t ignore what Mr. Trump was saying and doing, which revealed a character and temperament unfit for the leader of the free world,” he told the Wall Street Journal. Good for MItt. But it’s the least he could do. When he stood on stage to accept Trump’s endorsement as Trump was still in the midst of his full birther heat, he legitimized the reality star in a way that Fox News never could, all so he could shake off the “challenge” from Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich.
  5. Ted Cruz and the rest of the Not-Ready-for-2016 Players.
    If there was one man who had the credibility with the conservative base to have stopped Trump before he really got going, it was Ted Cruz. Instead, he kept calling Trump “terrific” right up until the point that Donald went birther on him. Then the Texas Senator looked like a conned fool as Trump questioned his faith, called his wife ugly, and suggested his dad was involved in the JFK assassination. He got what what he deserved and so did Jeb Bush, who shied away from attacking or even defending himself against Trump months earlier. The silence and shrugging of Marco Rubio, who occasionally disagreed with Trump but never condemned his wholesale bigotry and complete unreadiness for the job until it was too late, allowed the casino mogul to build momentum. A dozen men who should have known better allowed their party to became the vehicle for the ambitions of a man who has proved the Republican Party has the immune system of an earthworm.

Photo: Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the Rolling Thunder motorcycle rally to highlight POW-MIA issues on Memorial Day weekend in Washington, U.S. May 29, 2016.  REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Weekend Reader: ‘#NEWSFAIL: Climate Change, Feminism, Gun Control, and Other Fun Stuff We Talk About Because Nobody Else Will’

Weekend Reader: ‘#NEWSFAIL: Climate Change, Feminism, Gun Control, and Other Fun Stuff We Talk About Because Nobody Else Will’

In their hilarious new book, #Newsfail, Jamie Kilstein and Allison Kilkenny cover the hottest political topics of the day — as only they can. The creators and co-hosts of Citizens Radio share their takes on issues ranging from climate change to the war on drugs, and explain how their 100 percent listener-supported radio show has found wide success. 

In this must-read excerpt, Kilstein and Kilkenny recount their first time stepping foot into the famed Rockefeller Center studios to meet and interview MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.

You can purchase the book here.

There were many points at which security could (and, in retrospect, should) have stopped us from entering MSNBC.

For starters, we are both covered in tattoos, neither of us possesses particularly sophisticated sartorial tastes, Allison sometimes has accidental “death stare,” and Jamie often mistakes creepy for charming. We may have also had the wild-eyed, sweaty demeanor of newly liberated podcasters, recently escaped from an internet radio network that had asked us to take on Big Business sponsors— something we had strictly sworn off.

You see, the authors had aspirations of being pristine angels of independent media, untouched and unsullied by corporate cash. We would be the people’s media—that was the whole idea behind the name of our show, Citizen Radio. There was also the fact that no sponsor in their right mind would touch our show, but phrasing it the first way made us feel better about ourselves.

That concept of being sponsor-free hadn’t flown with the people who, ya know, we were supposed to be making money for. Say, our former boss.

Our whole career up until that point had essentially been managers, agents, and other boss-types saying, “We love you because you are political and edgy!” Then, once they saw what that nightmare actually entails, added, “Hey, could you not be political or edgy? But everything else, we LOVE!”

Case in point: During a time when we were covering the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy, circa 2007, our former boss asked us to take on AT&T as a sponsor. Mind you, at the time AT&T was being sued over allegations that the company provided the NSA with its customers’ phone and internet communications as part of a vast data-mining operation, so to us it seemed a bit like a conflict of interest.

“This is Citizen Radio saying, if you are going to be spied on, be spied on by the best: AT&T! They’re always listening!”

That’s when we decided to walk. We didn’t need a network or bosses. We were going to be free and supported by our listeners! This was the first day of our triumphant escape from the milieu of servitude. No one would dictate what stories we could and could not cover. No one would censor us!

Freedom! Beautiful, terrible freedom!

The only problem was: no one knew us. No one knew what Citizen Radio was. Then, we had a brilliant idea. We would get some big names to appear on the podcast as guests to drive up traffic. Sure, no one knew who the hell Allison Kilkenny and Jamie Kilstein were, but have you heard of a little lady named Rachel Maddow? Huh?? Have you?!

That’s what we thought.

Buy From Amazon.com

Thus, in order to flee the belly of the beast, we found ourselves entering its lair. Corporateville. Sucktown. MSNBC. Mainstream media.

Sure, it was the liberal arm of the giant, but it was still the very thing we were trying to escape. This was sort of like if Code Pink hired General Petraeus as their PR person.

Regardless, Maddow was nice enough to invite us to a taping of her show and to sit down for an interview with us afterward.

NBC Studios at 30 Rock is located inside a beautiful building that was constructed to make you feel upon crossing its threshold like a failure who will never amount to anything. Or that’s how we felt walking in, anyway. Everything is sleek surfaces and severe right angles. The carpet is printed with millions of small NBC pea- cocks, mocking your very existence. They seem to say, “Welcome to the real show, stupid podcasters!”

This was back in 2010, when MSNBC had recently granted Lawrence O’Donnell his own spot following Maddow. In fact, he was set to debut his show that very evening. Allison was dismayed at this news. From the first moment she laid eyes upon Mr. O’Donnell’s face, Allison has always harbored a general mistrust of him. Maybe it was because of the MSNBC commercials where he’s seemingly annexed a grade school classroom, occupied it, and refused to leave, and is now mansplaining life to his audience. Allison always imagined a class of third graders just out of frame, noses pressed to the door, their cries muffled as they plead, “Can we come back in yet, Mr. O’Donnell??”

Maddow’s studio is a state-of-the-art thing of beauty. The three cameras that film the show are robotic and glide around the lacquered floor in an intricate ballet. For comparison, our current studio is located inside our apartment and our equipment comprises a laptop, microphones, and a blue kid’s table from IKEA that cost twenty dollars. When we have a guest over, instead of having an unpaid intern who offers them a cappuccino, we have Jamie, who offers them a Zyrtec because “if the cats don’t come in the office, they throw a real fit. This will help with the sneezing.”

As an observer at MSNBC, you feel like a big clumsy ape in the robot cameras’ presences, relocated to the side of the set on one of three chairs propped up on a platform, desperately trying not to do anything that will fuck up this awesome high-tech choreography.

Jamie glared angrily at the cameras. Citizen Radio is an extremely low-budget affair (remember: IKEA table), but was especially so in the early days, when we recorded the show on our cell phones. Both hosts (i.e., us) called into the same number and a soundboard on the internet would record the show. It’s cool in the sense that anyone—literally, anyone—can create their own show, and we thought, Hey! We’re anyone! Let’s make a pretend phone show!

The only problem was, if the hosts stood too close together, there was massive feedback. This resulted in some highly awkward moments like when Allison and Jamie were interviewing then presidential candidate Ralph Nader, who was under the impression he was on a real show.

Nader gave a compelling answer to some question, and thrilled, Jamie flew back into the main room to give Allison an enthusiastic thumbs-up, which is when feedback tore through the room, and Allison whisper-shouted, “GET BACK IN THE BATHROOM!”

Jamie conducted the rest of the interview squatted in the bathtub and Mr. Nader probably realized he’d made a terrible mistake.

MSNBC doesn’t have to deal with these kinds of problems. When Chris Matthews’ earpiece goes out, he doesn’t look over to Thomas Roberts, who is happily giving him the thumbs-up, and have to scream, “Back in the tub, Roberts!”

If you enjoyed this excerpt, purchase the full book here.

From #NEWSFAIL: Climate Change, Feminism, Gun Control, and Other Fun Stuff We Talk About Because Nobody Else Will by Jamie Kilstein and Allison Kilkenny. Copyright © 2014 by Jamie Kilstein and Allison Kilkenny. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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