Trump and Clinton are the Face of What is Wrong with American Politics

There is something wrong with American politics if Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are the

presidential nominees for the Republican and Democratic parties.  Their candidacies speak both to the flaws of the presidential campaign selection process, the parties, the media, the substance of policy debate in America, and even to them as individual candidates.
Let’s start with the fact that both Trump and Clinton are horribly flawed candidates.  If all the polls are correct, they are the two most unpopular individuals to potentially get  their parties’ nominations in the last 40 years.  For both, more than half of those surveyed indicated that they do not like them or would not vote for them, potentially suggesting a race where significant numbers of voters stay home or hold their noses and vote for the lesser of two evils.  In a normal year with good choices neither of these candidates would get their party’s nomination and if they did, would be trounced by the opposition.
By the time the primary season is over barely 10 million people will determine the party nominees.  We have super-delegates, caucuses, and arcane party rules that make no sense, rendering it less than a fair democratic process to select party nominees.  These rules make the Electoral College seem fair and intelligent by comparison.  What is clear is that the primary process is unfair.  Trump and Sanders are correct–the process is hugely rigged and controlled by insiders, insulating the party against the change and reforms that are needed.
For Trump, his racist, sexist, and jingoist world view, his near vacuous policy stances, and his overall simplistic political views are embarrassing and they will do little to help the white working class who are his core supporters.   Trump’s claim to fame is his mastery of the media and his ability to bluster and pout his way over others.  He does well in a year where his part has abandoned working and middle class America and has embraced a plutocratic vision of America.  He talks a good game to help the people the GOP has left behind but offering many of the same policies that put the USA into the terrible shape it is.  Moreover, his stance on many social issues is simply the  same as what many Republicans have advocated for years, but it says it more clearly.  For example a few weeks ago when he said and then retracted his statement that women should be punished for having abortions, he was saying no more than really what many of the extreme pro-life really imply when they want to make abortion illegal.  Trump is both the logical extension and death of the Republican party.
For Clinton, yes sexism is part of her problem but certainty not every criticism of her is sexist. She tried this argument against Obama and it failed then.  She has a real credibility problem, consistently espousing positions that she repudiates when it seems politically convenient.  In 2008 she moved to the left when she say the party and Obama moving that way, she is doing that again this year with Sanders. But even if that is not true, face it, she embodies a neo-liberal corporate perspective on the world that is reinforced by a rather hawkish foreign policy perspective that is more classically found in Republicans.  Face it–Clinton is not a progressive. Yes she and her supporters like to point to a 92% voting agreement between her and Sanders in the Senate.  That proves nothing.  Given the polarization, almost all Democrats votes together nearly 90% of the time.  Moreover, that 92% reflects votes on issues on the agenda, not ideological views on where candidates stand or how they would vote on issues if they could set the agenda themselves.  Overall, Clinton’s selection kills off the future of the Democratic Party ready to be inherited by Millennials who see no good reason to support her and who will walk away from the political system if she gets the nomination.
Taken together, the choice between Trump and Clinton is that between two establishment elites who have marketed their personalities to the top of their respective parties.
Notice I say “marketed.”  The two have not so much campaigned as marketed their campaigns.  In fact, on of the main problems this year with the 2016 elections is the degree to which marketing has replaced politics and the news, and ideology has replaced facts. Look at the coverage by FOX, MSNBC, and CNN for example.  They are no longer covering the news so much as they are marketing it.  The debates and their political coverage–the issues the cover, the slants on facts–all reveal a bias in favor of how they can sell the news for profit.  This year the mainstream media, including the NY Times, and the Washington Post, abandoned all pretense of objectivity.  They created Trump because he sold advertising and ratings.  Recent studies point to all the free media coverage given to Trump and how little to Sanders.  We saw that in the repeated attacks on Sanders, in how they keep wanting to declare him dead.  Even such liberal stalwarts as Paul Krugman write less with authority and more with his biases showing.  He writes as a privileged Baby Boomer clueless to what Millennials and real people think and feel.
Part of the reason the mainstream corporate media has so misunderstood this years elections is because of their corporate and political biases, but also because of their inside the beltway perspective on the world that insults them  David Brooks recently confessed that he never understood the degree to which Americans were hurting and how they contributed to the populism fueling Trump and Sanders.  I guess it is kind of hard to see economic hardship when you vacation in the Hamptons,  own the Mar A Lago in West Palm Beach and are worth billions, or dwell in Chappaqua, NY and make $28 million per year.
The media have not only missed how the two parties have largely ignored most Americans, but it has missed the power ful generational forces, the polarization, and other trends driving American politics this year that distinguish it from last year.  They have largely assumed the present year is no different than the past.
But the media marketing of politics goes hand in hand with the candidate marketing of their views, and their surrogates doing the same thing.  Truth seems to be a major victim this year along with sanity and thoughtfulness.  Candidates and their surrogates spew and emote over inconsequential things, pushing interpretations of facts into the realm of fantasy.  “Liar Liar” and truth meters are working overtime.  I have also seen too many people I know better move way beyond offering cogent discussions into politics, demonizing those who support rivals (even of the same party) as stupid or worse.
There is something just wrong with our political system this year and Trump and Clinton are the face of all that is flawed and the are really a by product of all that has gone wrong.  Realistically, can’t we do better than this?

Out-Foxed! Fox News and the Crisis of Contemporary Journalism

Fox news is trapped–ensnared not only in the basic contradictions that plague the news industry in general– by a business plan that increasingly reveals the impossibility of it serving as a legitimate news service while also pursuing it profit imperatives and its political goals.   The first Republican debate and how Fox treated Trump then and afterwards point to the coming crisis this national news service faces.
Back in 2000  I edited a book It’s Show Time: Media, Politics, and Popular Culture, in which I a penned a chapter entitled “The Cultural Contractions of the American Media.”  In it I described the four roles or functions that the news media performs in our country.  There is first the democratic function; that is the task of informing citizens about public affairs and serving as a watchdog.  It is this function which is at the heart of the First Amendment constitutionalizing a free press.
As the theory goes, a free press that critically reports the news is essential to a functioning democracy.  For many, this image of a free press was formed during the middle to second half of the twentieth century.  It was the era of Walter Cronkite who told us “that’s the way it is,” of Woodward and Bernstein relentlessly pursuing a story even if it meant that it would bring a president down, or the New York Times publishing the Pentagon Papers.  We expected the media to be politically neutral, but critical, and to evaluate all the facts and decide on what is the truth.  Truth was not telling one side and then the other; it was often times recognizing that truth might be something different.  This is what reporters once learned in journalism school.
But this image of the media is quaint and old-fashioned.  For one, it is an image that seldom existed, especially when we remember that the press the constitutional framers had in mind looked nothing like what it does today.  It was first handbills and pamphleteers such as Ben Franklin, and then small partisan-controlled papers which literally were the party organs.  But the creation of a national media, the search for audience share, and the large bell shaped distribution of public opinion made it reasonable for the news to search for the center.  But that era ended, with the media pulled by three other functions that compromise its democratic function.
Unlike even a generation ago, the news media is controlled by a small handful of corporate behemoths.   Journalism professor Ben Bagdikan once talked of the big 50 media companies in America, it is now the big six, with Rupert Murdoch’s Fox one of them.  Fox is also one of the principle drivers making news corporate, and with that structure it is a for-profit business.  At one time news was a lost leader for a company, now it is a revenue generator.  To make money, maximize market share.    But in a era where now (as opposed to the 1960s in a pre-cable, pre new media and pre social media 24/7 news cycle) there are many apparent choices for news, profitability is possible with market segmentation.  Fox news figured this out.  Develop a product niche, capture that audience, and make a ton of money.  Instead of profitability through news neutrality, profitability comes from appealing to a certain audience–be it liberal, conservative, or whatever.  Political neutrality and objectivity take a back seat to profitability.
But to maximize profitability and market share the media has had to become more entertaining.  Ben Barber, one of my former professors, talks of a world where we are increasingly distracted by many diversions.  We do not just have to watch the news–we can do a hundred other things to entertain us.  Thus corporate news in presented increasingly in a format to entertain us.  Thus the fine line between Comedy Central and legitimate news.  Watch morning “news” shows, they are more about entertainment or hyping other television shows or personalities.  This is the world too of politainment that I have written about.
Finally, as corporations they too have their own political interests.  They lobby the federal government, they support candidates, they have their ideological and political biases.  Taken together, the corporate, for-profit, entertainment driven aspect of contemporary news often all but makes the democratic function impossible.  “All the news that’s fit to make money” is what it is about.
So how does this apply to Fox national news?  They are trapped by these four conflicts as are the other major news services.  But Fox has a special problem–its business plan was more extreme than others, and it also had a fifth imperative constraining its behavior, specifically serving as a mouthpiece for the Republican Party.  Fox has been profitable for years and has been able to hide behind the veneer or being real legitimate journalism, but the Republican debate last week laid bare all the problems it and much of the American media faces.
In going after Trump Fox stood to make the debate a ratings hit and it succeeded.  It might have also been a way to show it was a legitimate news service while also being a guardian of Republican orthodoxy.  Megyn Kelly too may have viewed the debate to show she was a real journalist, not simply the shrill conservative commentator that her nightly show reveals.  But now all of this has exploded on Fox and Kelly.  Post debate Trump’s poll numbers are up, Rogers Ailes effectively apologies to Donald Trump, and 20,000+ sign a petition demanding that Fox prevent Kelly from hosting another Republican debate because she is biased and instead she should question the Democrats instead.
What is at stake for Fox is its veneer of journalistic legitimacy which was always critical to its business plan.  The debate it hosted was a debacle and the backlash from it is not over.  Nothing here says that Fox will cease to exist or that it will lose money, but what we may conclude is that its product and business plan are forever damaged.  Fox is trapped and there may be no way out of the contradictions it faces.