The Mutual Dependence of Donald Trump and the News Media
But he is also taking advantage of a momentous and insecure time in American media.
News organizations old and new are jockeying for survival in a changing order, awash in information and content but absent the pillars they could always rely upon, like reliable advertising models, secure places on the cable dial or old-fashioned newsstand sales.
.. In that environment, Mr. Trump brings a welcome, if temporary, salve. He delivers ratings and clicks, and therefore revenue, which makes him the seller in a seller’s market. “I go on one of these shows and the ratings double, they triple,” Mr. Trump accurately told Time a few weeks ago. “And that gives you power.”
.. Fox News has its business challenges like anyone else. But it stands securely atop the news ratings, knows its mission, painstakingly maintains its special relationship with conservative audiences, and is therefore a revenue driver for its parent company, 21st Century Fox.
.. With CNN’s debates and heavy coverage of Mr. Trump, the network’s ratings have increased about 170 percent in prime time this year.
.. Understandably, Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN Worldwide, was beaming when I saw him at a lunch with other reporters last week. “These numbers are crazy — crazy,” he said, referring to the ratings. How crazy? Two-hundred-thousand-dollars-per-30-second-spot crazy on debate nights, 40 times what CNN makes on an average night, according to Advertising Age. That’s found money.
.. The New York Times’s Upshot team, using data from mediaQuant, reported last week that Mr. Trump had received nearly $1.9 billion worth of news coverage; his next closest Republican competitor, Ted Cruz, received a little more than $300 million. Hillary Clinton has received less than $750 million.
.. The imbalance in coverage has, though, led to spectacles like the one on March 8, when all of the cable news networks showed Mr. Trump’s 45-minute-long primary night news conference in full. While Mrs. Clinton’s victory speech went uncovered, Mr. Trump used the time to hawk Trump Steaks and Trump Wine.
.. Where Fox News refused Mr. Trump’s demand this year that it remove Ms. Kelly as a debate moderator, and lost his participation, ABC News appeared to accede to Mr. Trump’s request that it break its debate partnership with The New Hampshire Union Leader, which had harshly editorialized against him.
.. all of the shows went along with Mr. Trump’s insistence that he “appear” by phone — all except one, “Fox News Sunday With Chris Wallace.”
.. On her show on Friday, Ms. Kelly made an oblique call for solidarity. “I’m the second-highest-rated show in all of cable news and I haven’t had Trump on in seven months,” she said. “It can be done without him too.”