Populism, the Pandemic and the Media

Journalism in the age of Covid, Trump, Brexit and Johnson

John Mair, Tor Clark, Neil Fowler, Raymond Snoddy, Richard Tait, John Mair, Tor Clark, Neil Fowler, Raymond Snoddy, Richard Tait

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000618488
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Populism is on the rise across the globe. Authoritarian populist leaders have taken over and solidified their control over many countries. Their power has been cemented during the global coronavirus pandemic, though perhaps the defeat of populist-in-chief Donald Trump in the 2020 US presidential election (despite his continuing protestations to the contrary) has seen the start of the waning of this phenomenon?

In the UK Brexit is 'done'; Britain is firmly out of the EU; Covid is vaccinated against; and Boris Johnson has a huge parliamentary majority and, despite never-ending problems, of his own and others' making, his grip on power with a parliamentary majority of more than 80, still seems secure. Meanwhile culture wars continue to rage.

How has media, worldwide, contributed, fulled or fought this populism. Cheerleaders? Critics? Supplicants?

This book examines those questions in 360 degrees with a distinguished cast of authors from journalism and academia.

Section one January 6 and the end of Trumpism?

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Dispatches and analysis from the heart of the 21st century American drama

Raymond Snoddy

What better place to start a book on the media than with three working journalists, observing, reporting, analysing; in this case three television journalists who are household names, ITV’s Robert Moore, Jon Sopel of the BBC and Matt Frei of Channel 4 News.

Frei recounts his one and only meeting with Donald J Trump and suggests what is likely to happen now. Sopel opens telling pages from his diary of the recent presidential election campaign.

Remarkably Moore tells it like it was from the heart of the mob, rioters or insurrectionists – call them what you will – who marched on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Moore was there in the midst of the attack with his camera crew. His coverage will probably win broadcasting awards but, as he explains, there was something far more remarkable than recording historic events breaking before his eyes – the fact that in a city with more television journalists than any in the world he was almost alone.

The US networks had reporters inside Congress but they were in front of fixed camera positions with constant commitments to do live analysis and with ‘no remit to roam’. The networks sacrificed newsgathering to comment. The 24-hour news channels such as CNN and Fox chose to cover an attempt to overturn a presidential election by force with endless, polarised, studio-based panel discussions.

So it was that the primary task of reporting from the heart of the demonstration in Washington DC, events unprecedented in modern American history, fell largely to a television journalist from London. Moore argues there should now be a period of reflection by American television, which failed to find out what was happening in their own country, outside of Washington. January 6, Moore argues, raises even more questions for cable television news channels, not only over their coverage, or lack of it, on the day, but also ‘the more consequential issue of whether the extreme partisanship which has dominated so much television, radio and online conversation during the Trump years was a factor in nurturing the extremism which led to the crisis’.

Moore believes American television journalism should go back to first principles, showcasing editorial balance and listening to people with diverse perspectives from far beyond the studio. “Above all we must remember we are newsgatherers or we are nothing but noise,” he argues.

We choose two days from Sopel’s election diary, the first day of Trump’s re-election campaign and the last, more than 500 days later. Sopel was there in Orlando, Florida, on June 18, 2019, when Trump launched his campaign with thousands queuing to get into the Amway Center. One Trump supporter told Sopel his president is Jesus-like, here to do God’s work. Another woman expressed pride at travelling all the way from California to attend. The Trump supporters chant their favourite slogans from last time such as Make America Great Again, Lock Her Up and Build the Wall before being steered by Trump away from MAGA, the greatest political slogan of all time according to Trump, to KAG – Keep American Great.

Roll forward to ‘the tumultuous, astonishing’ decisive day, November 7, 2020, the day when it became clear Trump had effectively lost. The call from CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that Joseph R Biden Jr was the next President-elect of the US came at 11.15am. “They really do ‘the moment’ well,” notes Sopel, who lovingly portrays the Trump campaign’s press conference that was not held at Philadelphia’s Four Seasons Hotel. “Let history record that the story which began with Donald Trump descending the gold elevator in his ritzy Manhattan apartment block on 5th Avenue to launch his presidential bid ends here in a scruffy suburb of Philly, five years later. And with the social media almost wetting itself laughing,” Sopel writes.

At the time of his first and only interview with Donald Trump in 2013 Matt Frei saw Trump as a man with an opinion on everything but whose opinion was not necessarily worth seeking. “My bad,” admits Frei who notes that while everyone was laughing at ‘The Donald’, they were missing the point; that in the seedbed of bitterness, resentment and fantasy even the most absurd lie could become a reality for enough people to rearrange the political firmament. In retirement, Frei believes, Trump is less likely to focus on a presidential library – there would be room for only one author – than on burnishing his brand, raising funds, causing trouble and being the Republican kingmaker. “The Grand Old Party can’t live without him nor can they live with him. He is the parasite that has taken over the host,” Frei argues.

Bill Dunlop, a former Channel 4 journalist who has spent years in the US working for the European Broadcasting Union, believes the Trump era has forced US journalism into a split which is reflective of US society as a whole. In the face of abuse, exaggeration and a string of falsehoods from Trump, the traditional media have come down firmly on the liberal side. Meanwhile Trump supporters turned to an increasingly rabid range of right-wing news channels and the free-for-all that is social media.

Trump’s simmering resentment at Fox News intensified when owner Rupert Murdoch reportedly told associates Biden was going to win and exploded when Fox made an early call that the swing state of Arizona would be won by Biden. As Trump supporters increasingly turned to channels such as Newsmax, which grew its ratings from 58,000 to more than a million within a few weeks as Fox lost 20 per cent of its viewers, what was Murdoch to do? Fox decided to ‘double down and compete with the fiction’ (of electoral fraud) and more hours of ‘opinion’ programming rather than ‘news programming’, for Dunlop a missed opportunity by Murdoch to change for the better. Instead Chris Stirewalt, the Fox political editor who had accurately called Arizona for Biden on election night, was fired. Dunlop believes when a charismatic populist leader such as Trump, keeps a hold on millions and continues to disrupt social norms, journalism is stuck with it. “Like it or not, the media are still talking about Donald Trump today – and they will for years to come,” argues Bill Dunlop.

Next we turn to the work of three academics for much needed analysis, background and context. Professor Philip John Davies, emeritus professor of American politics at De Montfort University in Leicester, a presidential watcher for more than half a century, believes after systematically undermining the main media outlets in the eyes of his supporters, Trump then benefited mightily from the alternatives springing up in their place.

Regular network news US election expert Clodagh Harrington, associate professor in American politics, also at De Montfort University, emphasises the ‘potentially catastrophic downside’ Trump has created for society – the undermining of objective truths. Even with populist rhetoric surrounding the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson in 1868, and the Watergate scandal of President Nixon, she says, ‘the truth remained an objective entity’.

For David Cowling, a visiting senior research fellow at King’s College London and former BBC editor of political research, the most remarkable thing about the 2020 presidential election was how close Trump came to winning a second term given all that had happened during his presidency. As Cowling argues, the figures speak for themselves. The ‘relentless four-year crusade’ against Donald Trump resulted in a 3.1 per cent increase in the Democratic vote and an 0.8 per cent rise in the Trump vote.

In no less than 31 states, plus Washington DC, Trump’s vote share increased compared with 2016 while in 16 states his share fell, but by a mere one per cent in ten of them.

The most telling numbers of all come from an analysis of the increase in votes compared with 2016. In no less than ten states more of the extra votes went to the Republicans and Trump rather than Joe Biden’s Democrats. Cowling also uncovers ‘quite extraordinary’ numbers by comparing swings to Joe Biden to that of Hilary Clinton. In six states, plus the District of Columbia, there were swings to Donald Trump and in two other states there was no swing at all. The remaining 42 states showed swings to Biden but in 25 they were of 2 per cent of less.

In the great bastions of Democratic support California and New York, California registered a small swing to Trump while New York recorded the smallest swing of any state to Biden of only 0.3 per cent. The more Trump’s opponents ignore or disparage the reasons for his rise – their sense of being disenfranchised by the Democrat/Republican establishment – the more difficult will they find it to engage with the 74.2 million who voted for him, Cowling believes.

Prof Davies helps provide the explanation for Cowling’s ‘quite extraordinary numbers’. He cites research by Pew that around 30 per cent of respondents said they relied mainly on Donald Trump, the Trump campaign and the Trump White House as major sources of both election and coronavirus information. Research by the Election Integrity Partnership found a small number of social media account holders, including Trump and members of his family, generated most of the disinformation contributing to ‘the Big Lie’ that the presidential election was stolen.

Similarly Dr Harrington points to ‘the most dangerous use’ of the social media platforms, in promoting Trump’s refusal to accept the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Harrington notes on January 6 Trump engaged in what Congress termed ‘incitement to insurrection’ and tweeted messages of love to those at the Capitol and another, later deleted, stating ‘we will remember this day forever’. “The populism of Trump came at a high price, not only in the lives lost that day (Jan 6), but in the undermining of public trust in the democratic process and a fracturing of political norms. And that is too high a price for any nation to bear,” Harrington concludes.

Finally former director-general of the BBC and former chief executive of the New York Times Company, Mark Thompson, makes a weighty contribution on truth, big tech and the limits of free speech. It’s hard to imagine, Thompson argues, of a more thorough debunking of the conspiracy theory that led to a one-man armed mission to rescue children supposedly being held and tortured by paedophiles in secret tunnels under the basement of the Comet Ping Pong restaurant in Washington. Apart from everything else the restaurant didn’t even have a basement. Yet five years on ‘the underlying myth’ of Pizzagate is still alive and well. “It’s central to the QAnon conspiracy theory that holds that Donald Trump has been le...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Journalism under pressure but still a force for good
• Section 1: January 6 and the end of Trumpism?
• Section 2: UK politics and the media
• Section 3: Covid, journalism and society
• Section 4: Outside the metropolitan elite
• Section 5: Boris and Brexit
• Section 6: The new populism and the media