Corporate media is back to covering Trump wall to wall--and Andy Borowitz tell us why
It's worse than ever!
After Tuesday’s presidential debate where Vice President Harris “had him at the handshake”—as I wrote—crushing Donald Trump, you would think corporate media would be covering her non-stop. For example, she held a massive rally in North Carolina on Thursday that should have made headlines. While that did garner some coverage in corporate media, it was the equivalent of a grain of a sand on a New Jersey beach compared to what Trump has been receiving ever since the debate.
Now to be fair, Trump’s racist, totally fabricated claim during Tuesday’s debate that Black immigrants in Ohio were eating people’s pets deserves media coverage. As I wrote earlier in the week, this lie by Trump was intended to animate the bigots of his base. But it needed to be fact checked given it could incite violence against Haitian immigrants in Ohio or Black immigrants anywhere in the nation.
However, once Trump realized the media was covering the issue, he doubled, tripled and quadrupled down on it over the next few days. Trump knows how to manipulate the sheep of corporate media because he understands the corporate media world. And since then, they have covered Trump non-stop as he planned, thus, freezing VP Harris out of the coverage she needs to reach people in the final 50 days of this campaign.
That is where my longtime friend Andy Borowitz comes in. You likely know Andy from his NY Times best sellers and his award winning satirical column The Borowitz Report which for over a decade was featured in The New Yorker but is now on Substack—and I can’t recommend it enough. Borowitz—a legendary TV writer who co-created the iconic comedy show “Fresh Prince of Bel Air”—has worked in the corporate media world for decades in both entertainment and news.
Borowitz gave me a very insightful answer on this very issue in our recent conversation. He began by noting that “the media has really given Donald trump a free pass. And the reason is that Donald Trump has been very good to the media,” in terms of access and profits because Trump is good for eyeballs, ratings, click, etc. Consequently, “For decades they've had a love relationship with him.”
We all get that, but here is a point Andy made that was like a light bulb going off in my head: “As the corporate media has been dying, they've needed Donald Trump more than ever.” He added, “unfortunately the rise of Donald Trump directly correlates with the decline of legacy.”
Andy is right. The corporate media executives were more desperate than ever in the later years of Obama’s second term for people to tune in to cable and support corporate media publication. As Pew Research detailed at the time, in 2013 cable news had the lowest ratings in many years. MSNBC was down 24%, CNN was abysmal and even Fox News had lost 6% of their prime time audience from the year before. It was looking ugly in terms of losses and lower profits. And then Trump came along.
True, the Trump ratings boon of 2016 and even 2020 are gone. While cable news ratings are up this year compared to 2023, they are still well below 2020 numbers. For example, in August 2020 Fox News averaged 3.64 million viewers in primetime. This cycle they are at 2.27 million viewers. In Aug. 2020, CNN saw 1.7 million viewers in primetime, but this August just a little over one million—that is a massive drop on percentage basis.
But covering Trump does still deliver a bump in ratings compared to 2023. This also helps explain why corporate media helped normalize Trump since his attempted coup and Jan 6 attack.
Borowitz continued: “As the big media’s corporate and business model has collapsed. Trump has become even more important to them, because they don't have many sources of clickbait attention, media, etc.”
That is why we see wall to wall Trump now. If this race turned into a blowout this far out, it would be devastating for ratings. During the 2016 campaign, I heard a very high ranking CNN executive in a greenroom when I was waiting to go on say that they were happy the race was close so people would tune in. That has not changed.
As to the question about when will corporate media finally stop giving Trump a pass and free media coverage, the award-winning Borowitz stated bluntly, “My answer to you is when they stop making money on Trump.”
Now if you needed another reason to defeat Trump this November, Borowitz gave us one: “That's another thing we can accomplish with this election, if we can just consign him once and for all to the Mar-a-Lago retirement home we won't have to read about him anymore, because he won't be able to sell anything.” In other words, Trump will “no longer have any value” to corporate media.
This is why Trump could get crushed in Tuesday’s debate yet still garner a tsunami of free media coverage. The corporate executives in media companies-like the ones in insurance companies, or Big Tech companies, etc.—are motivated by one thing: profits. That is not a secret. In addition, we know many of the top corporate media executives want Trump to win because he will give them a tax cut, curtail regulations and allow more mergers so less competition and in turn more profits.
But what corporate media is doing with all Trump, all the time prevents Harris from reaching that small percentage of voters who are truly undecided. It also prevents Harris from further exciting her own supporters who don’t get see her deliver speeches to packed arenas, talk issues, etc. And alarmingly it makes Trump seem bigger than life and invincible.
Corporate media is not our friend. It’s not our enemy either. It’s simply a vehicle to make money. And their collective actions in this election are hastening their decline while helping independent media platforms grow.
You can watch my entire interview with Andy Borowitz below:
Need a lot of Laughs?! Every Friday on my show it's time for What Just Happened?! as we look back at the insanity of the week! Joining me this week are V Spehar of Under The Desk News and Comedian Hal Sparks to joke/talk the debate, Trump’s obvious affair with Laura Loomer and more.
Rep. Ro Khanna of Calif talks to me about the debate, winning in 2024 and his conversation with VP Harris about changing US policy when it comes to Gaza:
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I want his retirement home to be federal and/or state prison.
Wonder if they ever considered the fact that people are sick of everything to do with trump and turn those broadcasts off? And never go back for more of his filth.