The Media is Looking at Life After the Trump Bump
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TV networks and stations have been ringing up ratings thanks to Donald Trump.
Trump and his antics have helped stations goose the numbers, but those days are coming to an end.
Digiday writes that times may be a-changing. The Coronavirus is raging, the country’s economic picture looks bleak, and the president seems poised for defeat. The Trump moment — a boon for TV ratings, web traffic, video views, retweets, and for a sense of journalistic purpose — could be coming to a close at a perilous time in the media business. The advertising market has been crushed, with layoffs, furloughs and cutbacks felt across the industry.
In place of Trump, the defining story of a media generation would likely be a much more conventional and comparatively “boring” situation: President Joe Biden.
“What would go away is the bad guy in the story. There’s no antagonist. So what are we tuning in for?” said Jonathan Klein, the former president of CNN. “Grandpa is a nice guy. Everybody might be relieved to not watch as much cable news anymore and go find a book to read, a garden to plant, or a socially-distanced walk to take.”
Klein knows how presidential transitions impact the media environment. Following the passionate viewer enthusiasm for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and election, Klein was ousted from CNN in 2010 amid low prime-time ratings and, in his opinion, post-election viewer fatigue during the financial crisis.
The same might be true in 2021. “What Trump gave journalistic outlets was an audience that felt the urgency,” he said. “Certainly if Trump loses, that urgency among 70% of the audience might dissipate a little bit, but you’re still going to be in the midst of an economic calamity, this wrenching social debate over inequality, and have a disease that may be killing tens of thousands of people a week.”
