Which Media Figures Stand to Benefit from the 2016 Election?

By Zack Boehm on October 18, 2016

As the Sturm and Drang of the election season reaches its fever pitch, the sordid, sad spectacle of the whole affair has made it impossible to look away.

The lurid, theatrical, noxious, train wreck that is this campaign season has seized upon our national attention so viscerally that it’s become difficult to talk, write, or think about anything else.

And for good reason.

If most presidential elections represent distinct inflection points in American history, then this one feels like it has the potential and potency to redraw philosophical lines in contemporary American politics that have slowly become entrenched and ossified over the last century.

However, our transfixed, bleary eyed bemusement with this election has resulted in something like a collective monomania, where we’ve become so obsessed with the gruelingly slow explosion that we’re desensitized to the collateral damage.

But the things happening peripherally are important. The complexion of American political and news media, for example, will probably experience fundamental and irrevocable changes as a direct result of this election. Strategic Russian hacking operations have shown that our media is vulnerable to malicious external actors seeking to manipulate and delegitimize our democracy. Fringe alt-right sites like Drudge and Breitbart have claimed a kind of ideological hegemony over one of our nation’s two major political parties. Internecine public squabbling among Fox News personalities has revealed rifts in what has long been the cable news bastion of mainstream conservativism. Conspiracy theorist charlatans like Alex Jones have been yanked from the weirdest recesses of the internet and into the spotlight—a symptom of a national political dialogue that has become completely debased and divorced from logical consistency or fact-based reasoning.

But as Petyr Baelish (doesn’t all of this feel like something Littlefinger the political nihilist might have masterminded?) once famously snarled: “Chaos is a ladder,” and a few media members have used the entropic free-for-all of this election as their own Werner 24 ft Fiberglass Extender, climbing above the fray and in an attempt to establish themselves as major figures in whatever the post-2016 media landscape may look like.

Here are a few expedient media mavens who have climbed the chaos ladder this election season.

Steve Bannon

theatlantic.com

It’s difficult to come up with a member of the media who has better leveraged the bedlam of this election into a power-grabbing blitz of self-promotion than Steve Bannon.

Before he signed on as Trump’s campaign C.E.O and political consigliere, Bannon was the executive chairman of Breitbart News, where he worked concertedly to foment the kind of white nationalistic fervor that has become a defining feature of Trump’s candidacy. As Ryan Lizza points out in the New Yorker, Breitbart initially leaned toward the rigid traditionalism of Ted Cruz. However, as soon as Trump entered the race and began demonstrating his proclivities for protectionism and gruff insensitivity, Breitbart essentially became an extension of the Trump campaign, publishing stories like “Donald Trump: Candidate for Our Age” and “20 Reasons Why It Should Be Donald Trump in 2016.”

And so, when a flailing Trump nixed his erstwhile campaign C.E.O Paul Manafort, Bannon was the perfect successor.

It really can’t be understated how devastatingly effective Bannon’s maneuvering has been. Over the course of a few months, he has gone from running a website whose readership consisted mainly of Twitter provocateurs with Make-America-Great-Again-Pepe avatars, to being the ideological architect of the most flagrantly divisive presidential campaign in recent memory.

This past week, Trump claimed that “Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international bankers to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty,” the same thinly veiled proto-fascist, anti-Semitic rhetoric that Bannon routinely sanctioned at Breitbart. This indicates that Trump, as a final play to make things competitive, has given himself over to Bannon and his unapologetically alt-right messaging. The inmates are running the asylum.

The “Keepin’ it 1600″ Guys

John Favreau and Tommy Vietor, youtube.com

Keepin’ it 1600,” a political podcast hosted by John Favreau, Dan Pfeiffer, John Lovett, and Tommy Vietor, has, over the course of this election cycle, has gone from a rickety experiment by self-described media neophytes to, perhaps, the most popular political podcast in the U.S.

The podcast, which airs twice a week on the Ringer Podcast Network, has been able to capitalize on the vast market of people who want to hear young, experienced, winsome interlocutors be absolutely exasperated by the absurdity of this election.

Favreau, Pfeiffer, and Vietor are all former Obama officials, and this works to their benefit in a couple of important ways.

For one, it offers them a perspective and an authenticity that few other political pundits can claim. Their insight into the unglamorous grit of campaigning or the 24/7 frenzy of working in the White House enriches the show and qualifies their hot-takes.

Secondly, the near unprecedented popularity of Barack Obama as an outgoing president has probably, in some small amount, been conferred to his former acolytes just by virtue of association. The fracas of 2016 has meant that a plurality of American’s already have a kind of wistful nostalgia for the Obama years. The Keepin’ it 1600 guys have used this to their advantage, positioning themselves as members of a successful administration and therefore claiming the authority to call out the political lunacy of the last year.

John Oliver

hbo.com

In 2016, it seems like John Oliver may be finally fulfilling the role for which he was prophesied.

It seems like he may be finally taking on the mantle of Jon Stewart.

Oliver has long been a darling of beltway liberals, but his coverage of this election could catalyze his jump to the mainstream. One (anecdotal, nonscientific) indicator of this trend is the meteoric rise in headlines like “John Oliver Unleashed Hell on Republicans Trying to Distance Themselves from Trump” or “John Oliver Rips into Trump: ‘He calls to mind both Frankenstein’s monster and a rabid dog.” These are exactly the sorts of ledes that were plastered across left-leaning media websites the morning after an especially trenchant Stewart rant.

Of course, some feel the same about Oliver as they did about Stewart—that he’s moralizing and sanctimonious, or that he hides behind the “comedian” moniker when challenged about his handling of news. There’s also the small detail that Oliver is English, and although he is eminently self-effacing about his British Subjecthood, it may leave a sour taste in some peoples mouths to hear a Cambridge educated British expat skewer American politics

However, Oliver’s ability to summon a kind of biting, hyperarticulate indignation, and his knack for positing himself as a source of stinging sanity in a world gone psychotic, evokes the same kind of role once played by Jon Stewart in the liberal American universe. There has inarguably been a void in the political lives of American liberals since Stewart’s departure, but the way Oliver has covered this election suggests that the void may soon be filled.

Donald Trump

businessinsider.com

Make no mistake, Donald Trump is, above all else, a television star. In fact, it’s one of his few qualifications as a candidate that can’t be disputed or discredited.

While this election has seen his reprehensible character revealed and his blithering ignorance mocked, Trump has arguably accomplished what he initially intended to accomplish when he first entered the race: he has made himself one of, if not the most (in)famous man on Earth, and he has established a base of rabid supporters who will likely remain enthusiastically faithful to him and his brand after his probable loss in November.

Folks have long speculated that, if he were to lose, Trump would use the momentum he’s generated as a blustering demagogue to create a kind of Trump TV media empire. Now that it looks like defeat is less a possibility and more an eventuality, The Financial Times has reported that “Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has informally approached one of the media industry’s top dealmakers about the prospect of setting up a Trump television network after the presidential election.”

If a 24 hour Trump Network really is on the horizon—and I see no reason to believe that Trump will be eager to yield the spotlight—then here’s a rough sketch of how I see the next few years playing out.

-          Trump loses the election by comfortable, maybe historic margins. Makes a “concession” speech wherein he overtly and dangerously suggests that the election might have been rigged, and wherein he promises his supporters that he will remain a prominent figure in American politics

-          He continues to make the rounds on talk shows, insisting that he was the victim of a Machiavellian global conspiracy. Probably calls for Hillary Clinton’s impeachment the day she steps into office.

-          He eventually establishes Trump TV, which will amount to a Trump propaganda machine and which will probably continue to normalize alt-right modes of thinking.

-          Trump TV pulls such vast swaths of viewers from Fox News that Fox either a) ceases to exist as a popular source of conservative programming or b) becomes reframed as the more center-right, moderate (could you imagine) alternative to Trump TV.

-          Trump continues to bedevil the Republican Party by retaining and growing his base of support through the popularity of Trump TV. This means that the Republican establishment will either have to eschew traditional American conservatism once and for all and align themselves with Trumpism, or completely disavow Trump (which also means disavowing the millions of loyal Trumpistas that got him elected as the Republican candidate) in favor of supply side economics, free trade, and tax cuts for the wealthy. It’s difficult to predict which of this scenarios is likelier to materialize. In all likelihood, what will probably happen is that Trump and the Republicans will have an acrimonious falling out and go their separate ways. The portents point pretty clearly to this development.

-          Trump uses Trump TV as a platform to launch his new alt-right, ethno-nationalist, protectionist, isolationist major third political party. Think Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party but with less environmentalism and more Pepe memes.

-          In early 2019, Trump announces his candidacy for President of the United States, and the nation gets to ride this crazy rollercoaster all over again.

Follow Uloop

Apply to Write for Uloop News

Join the Uloop News Team

Discuss This Article

Get Top Stories Delivered Weekly

Back to Top

Log In

Contact Us

Upload An Image

Please select an image to upload
Note: must be in .png, .gif or .jpg format
OR
Provide URL where image can be downloaded
Note: must be in .png, .gif or .jpg format

By clicking this button,
you agree to the terms of use

By clicking "Create Alert" I agree to the Uloop Terms of Use.

Image not available.

Add a Photo

Please select a photo to upload
Note: must be in .png, .gif or .jpg format