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The Media and Politics

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Developments in American Politics 9

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Abstract

This chapter examines the political communication skills that Trump brought to Washington during his administration, and the ways those skills interacted with a changed landscape of media channels. The White House’s media management during the coronavirus pandemic provides a case study of the classic Trumpian strategy of distraction. This in turn contributed to public confusion regarding the scientific evidence and undermined the governmental response to the pandemic. These misleading messages sit comfortably with consistent attacks by President Trump on the believability of any media source that questioned his actions, attacks that steadily elevated to underpin the Trump team’s ‘Big Lie’ that the 2020 election was stolen and should be overturned, perhaps even to the point of violent insurrection.

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Further Reading

  • Marco Morini, in his book Lessons from Trump’s Political Communication: How to Dominate the Media Environment (London, Palgrave Pivot, 2020), introduces the reader to Donald Trump the disintermediator, running as though in a permanent campaign, deploying rhetoric in similar ways to 1930s populist leaders and dictators, and exploiting contemporary media opportunities. Despite its title Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson’s Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality (New York, Liveright, 2020) says almost nothing directly about the Twittersphere, instead concentrating on the shift of the Republican party to a strategy in which public policy increases the concentration of wealth in few hands while using the rhetoric of outrage to recruit voters to its cause. Trump’s voice, mediated by Bob Woodward, can be found in Rage (New York, Simon and Schuster, 2020).

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  • An analysis by Mark Thompson, Enough Said: What’s Gone Wrong with the Language of Politics? (London, The Bodley Head, 2016) broadens the field of enquiry, including examples of shifts in the delivery and reception of political rhetoric from both sides of the Atlantic in recent decades. Addressing just the USA Do Facts Matter: Information and Misinformation in American Politics (Norman, OK, University of Oklahoma Press, 2015) by Jennifer L. Hochschild and Katherine Levine Einstein discusses several issues that retain long term significance in US politics, including the views of anti-vaxxers.

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  • A good general background to the field is provided by Aeron Davis’ Political Communication: A New Introduction for Crisis Times (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2019). An almost constant diet of newly published relevant research can be accessed from the Pew Research Center (https://www.pewresearch.org), especially its division dealing with Journalism and Media. The Brookings Institution (https://www.brookings.edu) and The Reuters Institute at Oxford University (https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk) can also carry useful contemporary reports and information. Detailed insights emerge in many academic journals, for example an early post-Trump administration piece is an article, ‘Trump Trumps Baldwin? How Trump’s Tweets Transform SNL Into Trump’s Strategic Advantage,’ Journal of Political Marketing, 19: 386–404, 2020.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Business and Law, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

    Philip John Davies

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  1. Philip John Davies
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Correspondence to Philip John Davies .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Gillian Peele

  2. Department of Political Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Bruce E. Cain

  3. School of Social, Political and Global Studies, Keele University, Staffordshire, UK

    Jon Herbert

  4. School of Politics and International Relations, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, UK

    Andrew Wroe

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Davies, P.J. (2022). The Media and Politics. In: Peele, G., Cain, B.E., Herbert, J., Wroe, A. (eds) Developments in American Politics 9. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89740-6_7

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