Big-name politicians—such as former President Donald Trump, President Joe Biden, and their rivals—are jockeying for positions amid a media landscape that looks a lot like the Wild West lately.
High-profile shakeups have recently hit two major networks, Fox News and CNN, leaving candidates and viewers guessing the political direction that each might take next.
Mr. Trump, once aligned closely with Fox, criticized the network as being “very prejudiced” against him in a June 26 interview with Newsmax.
Meanwhile, in recent months, Fox’s left-leaning counterpart, CNN, fired longtime on-air personalities Don Lemon and Brian Stelter. Then, the network and Mr. Trump stunned observers by temporarily declaring a truce in their longstanding war over mutual accusations of spreading false information.
‘Narrowcasting’ Supplants Broadcasting
At the same time, the number of alternative information sources has mushroomed. There are now more than 3 million active podcasts, for example.
As the American electorate pays less attention to traditional media outlets, politicians have been forced to shift from broadcasting to “narrowcasting,” according to Sean Evans, a political science professor at Union University in Tennessee.
“Everyone’s trying to find a niche market,” Mr. Evans told The Epoch Times.
Political Junkies Rare
Decades ago, when Mr. Evans was growing up, he could choose to watch shows on one of three TV networks: ABC, NBC, or CBS.“Now, we have hundreds of choices; not just on TV channels but streaming, video games, radio, podcasts, and everything else,” he said. “So, the problem every [political] campaign continues to face is: ‘How do I reach voters?’”
Although “the most politically interested are the ones who are paying attention to politics,” political junkies make up a small percentage of the electorate, Mr. Evans said.
In March 2020, 56 percent of Americans closely monitored national news as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, the foundation reported last year.
About 52 percent paid “a great deal of attention to national news” in November 2020, according to the Knight Foundation, as Mr. Trump battled unsuccessfully to remain president.
Mr. Trump, who has never conceded to Mr. Biden, so far is the clear frontrunner to become the Republican Party’s presidential nominee; likewise, Mr. Biden is seeking reelection and is the presumed nominee for the Democrats.
Under normal circumstances, political news tends to be a tough sell at this time of year, according to Susan MacManus, political science professor emerita at the University of South Florida.
Summer activities and vacations are filling people’s calendars.
“This is the hardest time in politics to get someone’s attention,” she told The Epoch Times, “because people just have so much else going on.”
Ms. MacManus also senses “a weariness” in much of the U.S. electorate.
Sophistication Needed
The hurdles that candidates face now are even higher than they were in 2020, Ms. MacManus said.“The proliferation of media has made it much more difficult to reach very small slices of the electorate,” she said. “It requires a great deal of money to be spent and time spent on microtargeting; you cannot reach the same people with the same message or means of communication anymore.”
Another complication is that while older voters may use platforms such as Facebook, younger ones are more likely to be found on platforms such as Snapchat or Instagram. So to be effective, campaigns must calibrate their messages to connect with those different audiences on the various platforms, Ms. MacManus said.
Thus, their communication needs to become more sophisticated, she said.
“You’ve got to split your appeal into various little slices,” she said.
Those can include messages tailored to certain demographics, ideologies, gender, family situation, economic situation, or political affiliation, for example.
Trying to figure out how to best target those slivers of the audience is constantly shifting, Ms. MacManus said.
Hyper-Specialized Channels Coming
Mr. Bannon said a void has been created in conservative media in particular. Fox News “collapsed” after it fired Mr. Carlson, and Newsmax is “not going all-in” for the Trump “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement, he said.Fox and Newsmax have shied away from exploring controversies over the COVID-19 vaccines and allegations over “the stealing of the 2020 election, which are both issues that are central to the MAGA movement,” he said.
The vacuum has “allowed a basic explosion of alternative media,” he said, “and you’re seeing these new sites and new groups set up every day.”
“You’re going to start seeing tons of alternative media, I think, come up from the right, the MAGA right,“ Mr. Bannon said. ”There’s a huge appetite for it. And I just think it’s going to expand. I think it’s going to give people tons of alternatives.”
He foresees an increasing array of hyper-specialized media sources catering to “the MAGA right.” They each may focus on a single topic or a cluster of related ones, he said, such as economics and finance, national security, foreign affairs, “woke” corporate culture, and the “invasion of the southern border.”
Comfortable With Being Uncomfortable
One thing is sure as the landscape evolves, Ms. MacManus said: “Anymore, the same old, same old doesn’t work; you’ve got to go to some of the unconventional media that you’re less familiar with.”When candidates take a somewhat unexpected approach, “that, in and of itself, generates coverage,” she said.
Clearly, the candidates have been experimenting—Mr. Trump, by making temporary amends with his sworn enemy, CNN, and his GOP challenger, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, by using Twitter as a campaign launchpad.
While some people equated Mr. Trump’s CNN appearance with his walking into a lion’s den, Mr. Evans saw it as an intelligent move.
“No matter what happened,” Trump supporters were “going to see him as being in the right,” Mr. Evans said, and Trump’s critics were going to remain critical of him, as they bashed the network for giving him a platform from which he could spew what they call “lies.”
“So, he got two weeks’ worth of free media coverage like that,” Mr. Evans said. “Everyone was talking about Trump, and that’s what Trump wants.”
While the town hall story was dominating news cycles, Mr. Trump enjoyed “a better chance of reaching more people, or of more people actually hearing about him” rather than about his competitors, Mr. Evans said.
Minds Made Up
Still, there could be drawbacks to extra publicity. The more a candidate says publicly, the greater the chance that he or she will slip up. Yet for someone such as Mr. Trump, who has been in the spotlight constantly since he announced his first presidential run in 2015, that may not matter much, Mr. Evans said.“We’re here seven years later, and who hasn’t made up their mind about Trump? ... I don’t think there are many people who are going to change their mind about Trump,” Mr. Evans said. “And Trump has said all sorts of stupid things which would hurt other candidates, but for various different reasons, it doesn’t affect him.”
However, a message conveying negative information could prove more damaging to a lesser-known candidate, he said, “because you haven’t heard something positive about him first.”
That’s why Mr. Trump has repeatedly aimed at Mr. DeSantis.
“He’s trying to define DeSantis in a negative way, before DeSantis can define himself,” Mr. Evans said.
Playing Nice Doesn’t Work
In response to some people expressing dismay over Mr. Trump’s “attacks” on Mr. DeSantis, Mr. Evans said he doubts there’s a way to succeed in politics with a solely “positive” message.And, he said, “I would say there’s a difference between a negative ad and an attack ad.”
A negative ad is “a distortion of someone’s character, background, or something like that,” Mr. Evans said, while an attack ad is “something that is based on fact, an attempt to draw distinctions between you and somebody else.”
The ‘Twitterverse’
After months of anticipating that he would indeed seek the presidency, Mr. DeSantis used Twitter to announce that he was officially entering the fray a month ago.For another reason, Mr. Evans said, Twitter was an interesting launch choice for Mr. DeSantis. It may have implied to Mr. Trump, “Look, I’m on the web platform that launched you, and you’re not on this platform,” Mr. Evans said.
Mr. Musk has invited Mr. Trump to return to Twitter; the former president has so far declined. Some people speculate that Mr. Trump may soon find it irresistible to tap into the nearly 88 million followers who await on his dormant Twitter account.
Mr. DeSantis has about 2 million followers on his Twitter account, but various additional Twitter accounts support his presidential run. DeSantis War Room has about 112,000 followers, for example.
Setting the ‘Narrative’
Even though Mr. DeSantis’s campaign rollout wasn’t ideal, people have moved on to talking about other aspects of the presidential campaign.“What’s important is not individual things,” Mr. Evans said. Instead, “the overall narrative” about a candidate is what usually sticks with voters.
Campaigns tend to sell—and media outlets often buy—a “storyline” about each political hopeful, according to Mr. Evans. Examples could be “Joe Biden is too old” or “Donald Trump is authoritarian,” he said. Whatever the theme is, candidates’ campaigns try to “get the press to carry that out, so people hear it over and over again.”
At the same time, media outlets “want a race.” They “have an incentive to make it competitive on some level,” he said, because no one wants to follow the coverage of a political campaign that’s a blowout. That’s why media outlets may be tempted to boost lower-ranking candidates.
Thus, if a media outlet appears to be leaning toward Mr. DeSantis, for example, that might not mean that the organization genuinely favors him.
“Does this mean that they’re ‘pro-DeSantis?’“ Mr. Evans asked rhetorically. ”Or does it mean they’re ‘pro’ views and clicks?”
