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This kind of gets at what's really happening here. It's not that Trump is particularly crass or offensive by the standards of the media, it's that (usually older) people are shocked to see the boundary between media figure and elected office-holder broken. But it was always going to happen - Tony Blair and (to some extent) Clinton were perhaps the first to really get that, but they, and Obama, still played the expected role for the cameras. Trump goes off-script for the script of the mass-media presidency, but in a totally unsurprising way, the same way that reality tv is more popular than equivalent scripted tv, the same way HBO shows are more popular than the broadcast ones that can't show tits and guts and incest. Once politics truly began operating by the logic of distributed mass media (as opposed to, for instance, the movie-star presidency of Ronald Reagan), it just waited for a Trump to complete the process. McLuhan is chuckling in his grave.
It’s hard to compare broadcast-network show ratings to HBO’s because the latter likes to report both live and on-demand as a single number (and you also have to take streamers at their word to a larger extent). But, the biggest broadcast-network scripted series are pulling between three and four million live-viewers for average, mid-season episodes. One just isn’t going to read or hear much about Tracker, and every NCIS and emergency-services genre spin-off because they aren’t made for an audience that does much reading, writing or podcasting.
There’s also — in-between the aforementioned — the very popular offerings of Taylor Sheridan’s middlebrow Boomer-crack ouvre on cable. These shows can get a little grittier, but there’s still nothing approaching incest, and the nudity is capped at the occasional glance of buttocks.
”I’m the Landman! I’m here to tell people younger than 60 how the world really is! I’m tough but fair!”
Yeah this is Scott's "cultural dark matter" (though, for the specific point about grittier/sexier not being more popular, within broadcast TV we can just look at the comparative success of the incredibly successful Law & Order vs the even-longer-running Law & Order SVU). But HBO shows get elites talking, move the culture, inspire the next generation of creatives. Popularity with the audience that reads, writes, podcasts, etc. does matter more than the dark matter - particularly in politics, because they're the ones who decide if millions of voters get to see what Trump says on the escalator or if it's brushed off as a nothingburger. Trump is able to grab the negative attention of elites with conspicuous transgression, and then use that to get his brand across to dark-matter voters who respond positively to his heel performance.
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Very interesting comment. I wonder what new political being the advent of choose-your-own-experience AI-type media will summon.
"Ask the PresAIdent" app, you ask it stuff, the ai formulates a response, the response is sent to the president/his media staff for a fast and simple yes/no/maybe confirmation and the result is sent back to the user.
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