The Jacked Up Media
The media has prepackaged millions of articles that are jacked up – for lack of a better term – with Trump-related keywords. The more Trump-related keywords and keyword phrases, the higher these articles rank in search results. The more users click on articles trafficking in Donald Trump’s name, the more advertisers see a return.
So the political-media complex yammers on about Trump the Buffoon and Orange Man as they cobble together ever more outrageously ugly epithets in the vain hope that their junk food Happy Meal delivers clicks for advertisers and as a bonus influences political views.
Media outlets apparently have no appetite for a good old-fashioned human interest feature story.
By now, we should have seen the First Lady on the cover of Vogue. Vogue’s editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour, recently inferred Melania – a former professional model — is not Vogue-worthy.11
By now, we should have heard more about Donald Trump’s childhood growing up in Queens, New York. His childhood home was one block from Utopia Parkway; he was a good baseball player; and, he had thought he might go into making films. These are just three little-known biographical facts about the 45th President.
By now, New York City might have recognized his native son status and honored him for attaining the highest political office in the land. Instead of naming a street after the president or having a ticker tape parade down Broadway, left-wing organizations are petitioning New York City to name the one block on Fifth Avenue in front of Trump Tower after Barack Obama!
By now, we should have seen more soft news about the entire Trump family including his nine grandchildren, not to mention his youngest son, Barron.
Soft news is allowed to and supposed to humanize public figures by adding color, filling in benign biographical details, answering Did You Know questions. We learn that so-and-so likes their beauty sleep and turns in at 9:00 PM sharp every night. So-and-so rises with the sun and meditates for fifteen minutes before having coffee and then is off to the office. So-and-so drives a Rolls Royce and eats pretzels all day. Features can educate and entertain and illuminate subjects in ways that hard news cannot.
Who does not remember Jack and Jackie Kennedy boating off Nantucket or in Paris at a formal ball? Surely photographs of Ronald and Nancy on horseback on their ranch outside Santa Barbara, California are embedded in our collective memory? Kennebunkport, Maine is the backdrop of many George H.W. Bush tableaus.
Sadly, there are very few feature stories or profiles of the Trump’s to balance the demonstrably negative portrait the media offers up. We get slanted front page news aka fake news, and op-ed pieces that break all the rules of opinion writing, but soft news feature stories are conspicuously absent. Who would not want to write a so-called live-in feature story at a Trump property?
Neither left-leaning nor right-leaning op-ed writers can resist stringing together Mean Girl disparaging commentary that not only reveal bias, but often rise to the level of smear. Articles with syntax like the obligatory Greek Chorus singing ‘but Trump’s rhetoric’ clog Google’s top ranked pages.
We cannot put numbers to this premise, but one might surmise that newspaper and magazines sales would increase if publishers ran glossy coverage of this first family as they have for every first family in the modern era.
Architecture, interior design, and fashion industry sectors might see higher revenues if they embraced the Trump era as we saw when presidents like Reagan and John Kennedy were in office.
PC diktats prohibit any positive commentary to catch fire in the marketplace. Instead, the masses are treated to what appears to be well-timed hit jobs on the president and the first family.
President Trump was born and bred in New York City. He is no country bumpkin. His sophistication is manifest. Compared to the likes of a Michael Bloomberg or a Tom Steyer – both billionaires running on the Democrat side for president — he has considerably more panache.
Trump is rumored to sleep only four hours a night. This might be confirmed and a well-known fact if only reporters asked him about it. He spends what little free time he has golfing with greats like Tiger Woods. By all accounts he is a good golfer. He is not a swell, but then again he is comfortable around swells. He has schmoozed with a wide variety of famous people in the worlds of sports, business, film, the arts, fashion, and politics. A long list of A-list celebs owned apartments at Trump Tower. Yet he abstains from alcohol and tobacco products. None of this piques the interest of reporters?
Journalists are supposed to chronicle daily events accurately. This daily record is the foundation historians need to write history. The record of the life and times of Donald Trump may be irreparably harmed by the sheer volume of untruths published by the media. Just as harmful to the country, are the stories not told about Donald J. Trump the man, and the 45th President of the United States.
The media cannot risk glamorizing the Trumps even if it means losing money. Shelter magazines – women’s magazines dedicated to fashion, the home, and home arts – exist to promote trends and to influence taste that ultimately influence buyers of myriad products and services to the tune of billions. One wonders why self-interest has not trumped bias. It is a miracle that Trump’s message broke through the clutter given the fact that nearly one hundred percent of all Trump-related coverage is negatively slanted.
This is a ‘cutting room floor’ passage originally intended for the book The Elegant Trump.
