Corona and Trump media hype explained
How our media fuels outrage and changes politics
The same dynamic plays out in the political arena. During the 2016 election cycle, CNN made over a billion dollars in gross profit above the previous year driven primarily by advertising attached to news about the most outrageous candidate: Donald Trump.
This was far from the first time he explored running for president. In 1987, 2000, 2004, and 2011, Trump publicly considered a bid for the nation’s highest office. In 1999 he officially entered the race as a Reform Party candidate, testing his platform and evaluating the response, ultimately deciding he couldn’t get the traction necessary to win. After his unsuccessful run in 1999 Newsweek noted there simply wasn’t enough anger in the country to propel an independent candidate to victory.
His tone has not changed much in the last three decades. What was different about those previous years? One key distinction was this: The media wasn’t optimized for the kind of outrage necessary to provide coverage for a candidate like Trump.
This was the mechanism that came to define the 2016 campaign: the more outrageous his words, the more coverage he received. The more coverage he received, the more viable his candidacy became. The analytics firm Mediaquant estimated that between October 2015 and November 2016, Trump received $5.6 Billion dollars in “free” earned media from this strategy, three times his nearest rival.
https://medium.com/@tobiasrose/the-enemy-in-our-feeds-e86511488de