T he idea of a Trump presidency began as something of a gift for Jon Stewart’s farewell tour. Major media outlets treated it as entertainment news. Pundits viewed it as an impossibility. Last summer, I routinely joked that Trump’s becoming the nominee would be for American political scientists what the Soviet Union’s collapse was for Kremlinologists — it would obliterate decades of research and assumptions on a given subject (in this case, primaries).
There was good reason to discount Trump’s early rise in the polls. We had seen this sort of thing before. The political scientists John Sides and Lynn Vavreck refer to it as the “discovery, scrutiny, and decline” cycle. In 2012, candidates like Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain each briefly stood atop the polls. Early in the primary season, we often see volatile polling numbers as voters slowly tune in to the race. Candidates with high name recognition can often begin with an inflated polling lead; ones who aren’t “serious” can benefit from significant media attention at the outset, which boosts their numbers. But as public scrutiny and media coverage intensify, support for those who lack experience and party backing tends to fall away. No outsider candidate like Donald Trump has ever maintained their media dominance or polling lead in the way we have just witnessed. Something is different in 2016.
There isn’t one simple explanation for Trump’s rise. He is a unique celebrity candidate, with a particular talent for turning subtext into text. Certainly he benefited from a crowded field that featured an unending series of strategic pratfalls by his opponents. But one feature of his candidacy has stood out above the rest: Trump’s utter dominance of media coverage. He didn’t have a brief moment in the sun, followed by a return to normalcy. Even when Ben Carson or Marco Rubio were rising in the polls, Trump was never out of the spotlight.
Trump’s media dominance is made possible by the media’s new real-time rating tools.
Rather than a testament to Trump’s uniqueness as a candidate, his conquest of the media is more likely a product of something new altogether: the metrics revolution in newsrooms, where spikes in traffic can be seen as they occur — and, consequently, can drive coverage throughout the 24-hour news cycle. Thus Trump can lay claim to a new title: the first electoral beneficiary of the era of web analytics.
D onald Trump’s media dominance has been the subject of much analysis. As The New York Times has reported, Donald Trump received nearly $2 billion in free media coverage — about six times as much as his closest rival for the Republican nomination, Ted Cruz. (Cruz, you might recall, is also a bit of a showman with a penchant for attracting attention.)
How did Donald Trump’s candidacy happen? What ideas has he upended? How is academe responding? What does his candidacy mean for the future of democracy? We asked scholars from a variety of disciplines to weigh in.
The simple explanation for this gift from the media is what it’s always been: the ratings. “We’re giving the people what they want,” goes the usual defense from news executives. And that explanation is correct — as far as it goes. Trump news, Trump articles, Trump hot takes: All have attracted larger audiences than stories about his competitors. The Republican primaries with Trump have been far more entertaining than the primaries without Trump. The CBS chairman, Leslie Moonves, has said that Trump’s candidacy “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” Ross Douthat of The New York Times has likewise remarked that Trump is “such a gift to our industry.”
But that explanation puts the emphasis in the wrong place. Trump’s media dominance isn’t caused by public demand for Trump. It has been made possible by the media’s new real-time tools for observing the ratings.
Gawker’s chief executive, Nick Denton, once proclaimed, “probably the biggest change in internet media isn’t the immediacy of it, or the low costs, but the measurability.” Today, all online media outlets — and really, all media outlets are online outlets now — rely on sophisticated analytics to track, monitor, and judge which stories are the most popular. Some of these analytics are made public through “most read,” “most emailed,” “trending,” or “related” sidebars on their sites. Others are maintained internally, as tools to aid editorial judgment.
The thing to remember here is that the act of measuring a process also changes that process. Analytics send a signal to journalists and their editors. In this instance, the signal is that Trump brings in way more traffic than Bush, Cruz, Walker, Clinton, Sanders, or Carson. And this signal then helps guide their news routines — people seem to want more Trump, so let’s give it to them. This in turn sets up a positive-feedback loop, in which Trump’s endless media dominance feeds into the narrative that this election is All About Trump.
To understand just how much web analytics have influenced this election, imagine how news coverage would operate without these tools. Trump would still have been the same showman. He would still have the same instincts, display the same news-conference antics, boast the same skills on social media. But without real-time analytics, journalists and their editors would have been far less attuned to the immediate feedback of Trump’s effect.
Moreover, television ratings and circulation numbers — the tools of the traditional media landscape — do not provide granular data on how a Trump story compares with a Rubio story. They don’t signal which stories were the most read or the most discussed. Modern analytics tools demonstrate with greater precision just how much more popular Trump was than his opponents. In the absence of news analytics, news organizations would have spread their coverage more evenly, as they have in the past. Trump’s media dominance isn’t just driven by our attention — it’s driven by the media’s new tools for measuring and responding to that attention.
There are two important lessons here, not just about the 2016 presidential election, but about the study of politics in the digital age. First, virtually all social-science research is premised on a basic assumption: ceteris paribus (all else being equal). When making predictions about the 2016 election, we start from the assumption that the main actors and institutions within the system will behave much like they always have. This is a reasonable and safe assumption — most of the time. But in light of Trump’s upset, it is time for us to re-evaluate whether certain static assumptions are now changing. For instance, where once the “invisible primary” — the monthslong period before primary votes are actually cast when candidates struggle for traction — was waged through media organizations that strived for balanced, neutral coverage, will news organizations now allocate political coverage the way they do celebrity coverage? If the media’s behavior has dramatically shifted, it is worth thinking hard about which other areas of public life are about to become less predictable.
The second lesson is that digital media does not only provide alternative means for people to speak; it also creates new pathways for organizations to listen. We have grown accustomed to looking at digital media as an alternative to traditional media. We compare Twitter and Facebook to press releases and news events. We talk about how social media allows direct interaction between candidates and their supporters, and how citizens online are finding new ways to marshal support for their favorite issues and politicians. But digital media versus mainstream media is not an either/or proposition. We are operating in what the University of London political scientist Andrew Chadwick calls a “hybrid media system,” reinventing the rules of political and media behavior along the way. Donald Trump’s victory didn’t come about because he bypasses the media through Twitter. It is because he uses Twitter (and press conferences) to create a media spectacle, and media organizations, carefully monitoring their own analytics, respond with blockbuster coverage.
Analytics provide feedback about what readers, visitors, and viewers are most likely to click, view, and share. Media organizations are still learning how to balance this type of feedback with their traditional news values and editorial judgment. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, they are going to have to take a long, hard look at how they decide what’s news in the digital age.
David Karpf is an associate professor and director of graduate studies at the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs. An earlier version of this piece appeared on Civicist.
