The Outstater
Opinion Polls and PR Jujitsu
“There’s life and then there’s life in the newspapers.” Lillian Hellman, American author.
WITH LESS THAN TWO WEEKS before the election, Jim Banks, Mike Braun and Todd Rokita can rest easy. The corporate media hate them, an essential condition these days for a political victory. In fact, against all conventional wisdom, the smart play is to poke a reporter in the nose — figuratively, of course.
This relationship between negative media coverage and candidate popularity is embarrassingly obvious this election cycle. Washington Examiner columnist Byron York notes that at the end of Kamala Harris’s first month of campaigning, the conservative Media Research Center found that her coverage had been 84 percent positive, higher than any other major-party nominee ever. Trump’s media coverage, in contrast, was 89 percent negative.
And yet, reports CNN analyst Harry Enten, Trump is more popular at this point in this campaign than at this point in either his 2016 or 2020 campaigns.
“It’s entirely possible that wildly negative media coverage is actually causing many people to view Trump more favorably,” York adds. “After all, the media are some of the least-trusted institutions in public life, and if top media figures say something, millions of people are likely to think the opposite.”
Gallup reports that Americans continue to register record-low trust in the mass media, with only 31 percent expressing a “great deal” or even a “fair amount” of confidence in the media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly.” For the third consecutive year, more U.S. adults have no trust at all in the media (36 percent) than trust it a great deal or fair amount. Another 33 percent express “not very much” confidence.
Our diminished newspapers and television networks, then, make the perfect foil for an old political strategy. Several years ago at a political dinner I was seated next to the former press secretary for George Wallace. He seemed an affable fellow, so I asked the obvious question: How do you get good press coverage for someone so hated by the prestige media?
You don’t, he said. Wallace had become a master at what can be called public-relations jujitsu — he used the energy of his critics against them. Wallace identified himself through the over-the-top attacks by the East Coast newspapers, which, the press secretary noted, bore resemblance in the Southern mind to Reconstruction carpetbaggery.
His constituency returned Wallace to the governorship four times. “George was always careful to pick the right enemies,” the press secretary said.
Back home in Indiana know that this has nothing to do with policy or actual political views. Indeed, a councilman friend of mine, outspent three-to-one, alternately castigated and ignored by the local media, won re-election handily after pointedly refusing an endorsement interview at the hometown paper.
For the situation is just this: The young, woke staffs in media today look at a Banks, a Braun or a Rokita and see only middle-aged white men — fair game for shallow, ambition-driven journalism.
The rest of us, though, want to make up our own minds. And in this confused, fragmented informational environment, that can mean voting against the recommendations of the demonstrably untrustworthy. — tcl
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