John Dean: The Media Needed Trump More Than Trump Needed the Media. It's All About the Profit.
Trump’s exit, except for his incessant teasers that he will miraculously return to the White House, has left the corporate media “news divisions” desperately searching for alternative “entertainment” as their ratings plunged.
June 2, 2021
By John Dean
Have you heard that CNN ratings are down sharply? Also down at Fox, MSNBC, and even Newsmax. The cause is the disappearance of Donald Trump from the news. Entire weeks go by now without a major Trump eruption. That has hurt ratings and subscriptions. It has even made writing on Medium more challenging.
Can it be true that some of us who seriously dislike Trump sort of miss him, albeit for selfish reasons? Even when they embodied the worst in American politics, Trump and his family were the low-hanging fruit of journalism. Trump was the perfect target for rants about racism, greed, incompetence, nepotism, and a lot else. Pictures of him waddling from his golf cart to finish a hole made the evening news. Morning Joe appeared to risk having a stroke while condemning or disagreeing with him.
Now Trump is gone. Not totally, not yet, but the day is getting closer. Trump has disappeared from Twitter and Facebook, depriving lazy journalists of ready-made material to write about. He’s now giving speeches at weddings at Mar-a-Lago. I heard that the bride and groom at one reception were not happy. Would you rather hear the DJ play “Stairway to Heaven” or revisit the theft of the 2020 election?
Trump himself is aware that he is fading away. While he remains the puppeteer as far as Hill Republicans are concerned, it’s understood that most of his followers privately long for his departure from the stage. Only the hard-core nutcases remain on board. How long will Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga), the politician-dentist Paul Gosar (R-AZ), and gun-toting Lauren Boebert (R-CO) be around to promote him?
The Trump fade into darkness
Or is it that the light is going out at the end of the Trump tunnel? Evangelist Franklin Graham says Trump is too sick to run in 2024. Graham says, “he doesn’t eat well.”
Opportunists Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Ron DeSantis (FL) are waiting in the wings, ready to announce their runs for president as soon as Trump formally bows out. Hawley’s iconic fist pump gesture to January 6 insurrectionists is likely to be more appealing to right-wing voters in 2024 than an old tape of Trump telling a crowd to “fight like hell” as they left for Capitol Hill.
And prosecutors in New York, Georgia, and elsewhere are preparing criminal indictments that will pre-occupy Trump, most likely for the rest of his life. Images of Trump showing up at the courthouse and his statements condemning the “political witch-hunts” may be engaging for a while but will soon get old. And do people carry out political witch-hunts on has-beens? Once witches are dead, historically, the hunts stopped.
None of these developments are consistent with remaining politicly relevant. Evidence of that is the failure of his From the Desk of Donald J. Trump website. News reports suggest about 2000 reposts of Trump's statements to Facebook are occurring each day. That’s pathetic
With Trump about gone, what’s next for the news?
That is a question yet to be answered. Reporting on the (apparent) winding down of the pandemic is, well, boring. We all now expect things to get better and for life to return to something like normal. Biden and Congress are, well, boring. We know that Biden wants to spend big and that Republicans will fight him every step of the way. Who cares about the details? Maybe the outcome is of interest, but will you be watching a 90-minute CNN special on “What’s in the American Jobs Plan Act?”
The news always gets interesting when there are natural disasters. Hurricane season starts June 1. The first California fires of the season are already here as well as various tornados.
If an earthquake happens, that would be worth a few days of intense coverage, but where does that leave the long-term ratings of Fox, MSNBC, and others? If there aren’t any obvious Katrina-type screw-ups in the recovery, public interest goes elsewhere once the event is over.
Should the FBI be monitoring the media for illegal contributions to Trump?
The losses incurred by the media due to the evaporation of Trump are huge, in the billions of dollars. That’s an incentive to resurrect Trump’s career. If Trump were able to become again relevant, ratings would return. Efforts to try to make a story out of Hunter Biden, misidentification of the leaders of Israel and South Korea, and various other Biden gaffes have thus far failed to bring the viewers and readers back.
Should we worry that the media will decide they are better off with Trump than without him? Will Morning Joe and Mika start having him on Morning Joe four or five times a week, teasing him into claiming he is nearing a decision on running for president? If that happens, I’ll watch a morning or two, but my interest will wander unless Trump says or does something outrageous.
As Trump used to say, “Sad!”
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