The Conversation: Trump's nonstop newsmaking threatens to drown out all else

By JENNIFER MERCIECA

Of Texas A&M University

Like many other news organizations, The Associated Press maintains a scrolling “live updates” page. It posts the latest from the administration in a live ticker-tape fashion 12 hours a day, with multiple updates each hour, and President Trump keeps the ticker continuously busy.

“Trump is moving with light speed and brute force to break the existing order and reshape America at home and abroad,” an AP reporter observed.

Many Americans find the amount and pace of news exhausting, confusing, overwhelming and ultimately debilitating.

Political communication expert Dannagal Young characterized the problem this way: “How do you push back against a tidal wave? You can’t.”

I teach classes on propaganda, presidential communication and the dark arts of communication, and I’m the author of an award-winning 2020 book on Trump’s communication strategies.

Deliberately overwhelming people with a flood of news content is a propaganda strategy used by authoritarians like Russian President Vladimir Putin to distort reality and prevent people from clearly evaluating their government’s actions.

When Ronald Reagan’s first term as president began in 1981, several prominent political scientists noted in an analysis that a “week scarcely goes by without at least one major news story devoted to coverage of a radio or TV speech, an address to Congress, a speech to a convention, a press conference, a news release, or some other presidential utterance.”

Looking back, it’s hard to believe that Reagan’s presidential communication only attracted one major news story per week, especially since he is often called “the Great Communicator.”

The 1980s had a slower, pre-digital news environment than that of the current day, to be sure. But Trump is, even by today’s standard, generating a lot more news content.

Trump’s frequent press conferences, news releases, social media posts, public appearances and offhand remarks generate a constant daily flow of new stories and social media posts.

The proliferation of cellphones and social media allows many people to follow the news throughout the day. In turn, they come to expect other politicians to engage the public constantly, and berate them when they fall short.

Reagan averaged about 5.8 news conferences per year. Trump averaged 22 per year in his first term, according to the nonpartisan American Presidency Project.

Joe Biden averaged 9.25 per year during his ensuing presidency. In contrast, Trump has already had 18 press gaggles or press conferences since taking office in January.

An analysis by National Journal reporter George Condon showed Trump has already answered more than 1,000 questions from reporters since returning to office, which is nearly five times more questions than he answered at this point in his first presidency.

Trump has also generated news by issuing almost 90 executive orders, which he has used both as a strategy for exercising executive power over issues like foreign aid and as a strategy for attracting media coverage.

Reagan issued 50 executive orders in his first year in office in 1981.

Trump issued 72 in his first 30 days this year. That’s more executive orders than any previous president has issued in their first month over the last 40 years 0151 — including himself, as he had only issued 33 at that point in his first term.

Trump’s media strategy serves to intensify the approach he used in his first term. And during that term, The New York Times reported, “Mr. Trump told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.”

As former Trump aide and current “War Room” host Steve Bannon said in 2018, “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

So far this term, Trump has been flooding the media with an unrelenting tidal wave of news content, serving to dominate and vanquish the zone.

This strategy is evident in the Oval Office executive order signing events. Trump literally makes news by signing a large piece of paper in front of cameras and reporters.

These events are carefully staged political theater, in which Trump casts himself as the nation’s hero protecting it from foreign invasions, diversity programs or paper straws.

Many of Trump’s executive orders are facing legal challenges, and some have been shot down by federal judges. But it is the spectacle that is, I believe, designed to win the day. And it is very effective at generating news coverage that makes Trump look powerful.

“Trump, as we know from this first month, is the most newsmaking person to occupy the Oval Office I’ve ever seen,” New York Times Executive Editor Joe Kahn observed recently.

Media scholar Marshall McLuhan famously argued, “The medium is the message.” With Trump, the communication strategy is the message.

Communication is a tool. It can be used to promote democracy or to erode it.

Politicians’ communication strategies reveal, at least in part, how they think about governing, power and democracy.

Some communicate in ways that encourage people to ask questions and use their reason and critical thinking skills to evaluate public policies. Others use communication in undemocratic ways to manipulate and coerce, preventing citizens from using their reason and critical thinking skills to evaluate policies.

What does Trump’s tidal wave of news content say about how he thinks about governing, power and democracy?

As a media and governing strategy, I think creating an unrelenting flood of content is designed to enable Trump to attract and hold the nation’s attention, drowning out other voices in the process.

This overwhelms the media and exhausts the citizenry, as it’s not easy to absorb so much information at once. It also serves to prevent the public from scrutinizing the president’s actions.

From The Conversation, an online repository of lay versions of academic research findings found at https://theconversation.com/us. Used with permission.