Abstract
I argue that Donald Trump won the Republican primary contest and then the 2016 US presidential election, in part, because he is the master of media spectacle. I discuss Trump’s use of media spectacle in his business career, in his effort to become a celebrity and reality-TV superstar, and his political campaigns. Then, I examine how Trump both uses broadcasting and social media in his campaign and presidency and deploys a war against the media to delegitimize media criticism or opposition to his presidency. Yet Trump’s war against the media has generated a momentous battle in which segments of the media are fighting back against Trump in what has to be the most contested media spectacle in modern US political history.
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Notes
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I provide accounts of the O.J. Simpson trial and the Clinton sex/impeachment scandal in the mid-1990s in Kellner (2003b); engage the stolen election of 2000 in the Bush/Gore presidential campaign in Kellner (2001); and describe the 9/11 terrorist attacks and their aftermath in From 9/11 to Terror War in Kellner (2003a).
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On the Tillerson/Russian connections, see Coll (2013).
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Coll, whose book Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, (2013), is considered a major book on ExxonMobil, claimed: “reporting on Exxon was not only harder than reporting on the Bin Ladens, it was harder than reporting on the CIA by an order of magnitude,” adding: “They have a culture of intimidation that they bring to bear in their external relations, and it is plenty understood inside the corporation too. They make people nervous, they make people afraid” Coll cited in Schwartz (2012).
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On Russia’s intervention into Ukraine and Crimea and ensuing global controversy, see Myers (2016).
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On the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, the Contra war, and the Reagan administration, see Travis (2016).
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This account is similar to that in the excellent overview of Putin’s career in Myers (2016).
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Putin has long believed that Hillary Clinton was the spearhead of US interference in Russian affairs during her role as Secretary of State under Obama; see Herszenhorn and Barry (2011).
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The hacking is documented in Nance (2016), and many mainstream media sources, although it is denied in Kovalik (2017), and pro-Trump sources from the swamps and whacko-worlds of “alternative facts” which may be the enduring legacy of the Trump presidency. For a comprehensive analysis of how the Russian hacking interfered in the 2016 election and dangers for the future of US democracy, see Calabresi (2017, pp. 30–35).
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Kellner, D. (2019). Trump’s War Against the Media, Fake News, and (A)Social Media. In: Happer, C., Hoskins, A., Merrin, W. (eds) Trump’s Media War. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94069-4_4
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