This week the media spectacle that is the 2016 election cycle turned a corner. A different he-said-she-said dynamic took shape.
Donald Trump blasted the media, Hillary Clinton blasted him, and both took a break from the issues.
The lower the bar for this kind of political discourse from the candidates, the better it plays on the cable news networks. Easily digested and entertaining quips win the day over complicated thought or extended debate.
He’s still blustering, but she’s now responding with quotable zingers, which has given the conversation a more pop feel. This is accessible politics, with jokes and name-calling. Forget economics, immigration or NATO. This week it got personal.
It’s hardly news that Trump thrives on demonizing the media. Lashing out at questioners has been a productive strategy for the candidate thus far.
“When you criticize the media, you’re taking the eye of the public off the issue at hand. It’s a technique as old as the nation,” Gene Policinski, CEO of the Newseum Institute, said in a phone interview.
Trump’s skill at deflection was exemplified in a press conference ostensibly on the subject of veterans. What began as a reasonable inquiry by reporters diligently following the money turned into a media-bashing show. He called one reporter “a sleaze” and labeled the political press “unbelievably dishonest.”
The ploy worked in Trump’s favor. Media Matters reported “CNN, MSNBC and Fox News devoted more than five hours to previewing, airing and discussing Trump’s news conference between 6 a.m. and 4 p.m., compared with less than one hour of discussion of the Trump University lawsuit.”
But then came Clinton’s speech, her first real retort on a level that played to the crowd. Trump’s foreign policy ideas, Clinton said Thursday in San Diego, “are not even really ideas, just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds and outright lies.”
Clinton’s earlier strategy of staying above the fray was traded for gloves-off sparring. By the end of the week, the laugh-lines in Clinton’s takedown of Trump were quoted everywhere, steering from foreign policy into Trump’s personality, psychology and pathology in what sounded like a late-night hostap monologue. Her jibes about Trump’s “thin skin” were more effective than stacks of position papers on global affairs or economic policy.
The attention-getting machinery is operating at full tilt with less power on the press side to focus on issues.
“It’s clearly done at lightning speed now in the age of Twitter,” Policinski said. It’s unfiltered, unedited. “The media is much less in control of the marketplace now.”
“I just hope she doesn’t try to out-Trump Trump, the way some of the Republican candidates did several months ago,” Paul Voakes, journalism professor at the University of Colorado, said. That backfired for Marco Rubio, he recalled.
Getting down and dirty, she nailed the news cycle. She may not be “likable,” but Clinton has finally joined the soundbite culture. Her experience regarding Syria? Korea? Libya? No, the folks on the couch want to hear more about what she thinks of Trump’s bullying. With zingers.
