Is Legacy Media Counting on Another Trump Bump?

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Shh … can anybody hear that? It could be the sound of legacy media outlets collectively sighing, furtively relieved not to have to report on Kamala Harris for the next four years. What would they talk about? How many articles can somebody write discussing the semantics of a cackle or attempting to translate a muddled reply punctuated with hems and haws? Besides, Harris doesn’t generate clicks – not like Donald Trump. As much as so many left-leaning publications and networks appear to despise the president-elect and his antics, and as hard as they’ve tried to discredit and destroy him, some are likely hoping his return to the White House will at least be a catalyst to another “Trump bump,” a term coined after several news outlets saw a boost in customers and revenue during his 2016 campaign. But will it happen again?

The Trump Bump

A few months into Trump’s first term, The New York Times passed three million digital subscribers. When it hit seven million subscribers in November of 2020, it wrote, “There is little doubt that Donald J. Trump’s presidency has helped lift The Times’s subscription business, and the readership numbers have risen at a steady pace during his years in office.” During the 12 months preceding March of 2017, DC’s most prominent newspaper saw a 75% increase in new subscribers and reached 300,000 digital-only subscribers for the first time, a number that, by 2020, would be near three million, but which gradually decreased during Biden’s term. Worse, it lost 250,000 subscribers last month because its billionaire owner blocked an editorial endorsement Kamala Harris.

“In 2018,” explained the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), “‘Trump’ was the fourth-most-used word in the New York Times. On average, Trump was directly mentioned two to three times in every article, and indirectly mentioned an additional once or twice.” That almost sounds creepy and stalker-like. What about cable? “[F]rom August 2015 to November 2016, cable news aired about two hours per day (123 minutes) of just Trump talking.” Meanwhile, some networks were relishing “record ratings and huge increases in ad revenue by fetishizing the president.” Just before the 2016 election, CNN was expected to make $100 million more than in a typical election year. Fox News, NBC, and MSNBC also benefited from Trump’s entry into politics. Some networks were giddy and couldn’t hide it: “The Trump spectacle may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” said Les Moonves, the network’s chief executive, at a 2016 conference in San Francisco. “The money’s rolling in, and this is fun.”

By the fall of 2020, “There is wall-to-wall coverage for every outrageous word and action,” wrote CJR, “often leading outlets to inadvertently report incorrect information in their bid to keep everyone glued to their seats. They fact-check Trump constantly, but often only after airing – and, in many cases, repeating – misinformation. This can create what psychologists call an ‘illusory truth effect,’ where people end up remembering the falsehood, forgetting the correction, and then attributing their misinformation to the very source that had tried to correct it!” Of course, the media’s corrections haven’t always been correct, further misleading the public and confusing the heck out of anybody foolish enough not to unearth more details to check the validity of their information.

Thus, Trump Derangement Syndrome was born, an inadvertent creation that might’ve been unintentionally created by those responsible for keeping the electorate informed. What’s funny but not laughable is that some people within the press believe Trump wrecked the credibility of journalism. Yet a strong case could be made that legacy media outlets, in their coverage of Trump, destroyed their own credibility. […]

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