Description
The election of Donald Trump as US President in 2016 seemed to catch the world napping. Like the vote for Brexit in the UK, there seemed to be a new de-synchronicity – a huge reality gap – between the unfolding of history and the mainstream news media’s interpretations of and reporting of contemporary events. Through a series of short, sharp interventions from academics and journalists, this book interrogates the emergent media war around Donald Trump. A series of interconnected themes are used to set an agenda for exploration of Trump as the lynch-pin in the fall of the liberal mainstream and the rise of the right media mainstream in the USA. By exploring topics such as Trump’s television celebrity, his presidential candidacy and data-driven election campaign, his use of social media, his press conferences and combative relationship with the mainstream media, and the question of ‘fake news’ and his administration’s defence of ‘alternative facts’, the contributors rally together to map the parallels of the seemingly momentous and continuing shifts in the wider relationship between media and politics.
Table of Contents
Part I: Killing the Media.- Weaponizing Reality: An Introduction to Trump’s War on the Media.- Trump & the Press: A Murder-Suicide Pact.- Part II: Fake News.- Turning the Tables: How Trump Turned Fake News from a Weapon of Deception to a Weapon of Mass Destruction of Legitimate News.- Trump’s War Against the Media, Fake News, and (A)Social Media.- The War of Images in the Age of Trump.- Part III: Reporting Trump: Building the Brand.- ‘Authentic’ Men and ‘Angry’ Women: Trump, Reality TV and Gendered Constructions of Business and Politics.- Covering Trump: Reflections from the Campaign Trail and the Challenge for Journalism.- The Scottish provenance of Trump’s approach to the media.- Part IV: The Politics of Performance.- The Donald: Media, Celebrity, Authenticity and Accountability.- The Big Standoff: Trump's Handshakes and the Limits of News Values.- “Classic Theatre” As Media Against Trump: Imagining Chekhov.- Trump and Satire: America’s Carnivalesque President and his War on Television Comedians.- Part V: Media Out of the Margins.- President Troll: Trump, 4Chan and Memetic Warfare.- Trump, the First Facebook President: Why Politicians Need Our Data Too .- Trump’s Foreign Policy in the Middle East: Conspiratorialism in the Arab Media Sphere.
