“Trump spent every morning on the phone with me, with Page 6––he loved to get his name in the paper. As a result, he would drop dimes on other people in every industry he knew dirt on. You put the story in the paper, and then, three days later, you say, ‘Donald Trump was at a Knicks game with this supermodel.’ And he’s happy. That’s all it took.”
.. Calling Trump “shameless and shrewd at the same time,” Benza said “you might not like his style, but no one has played the American public and the U.S. government to this extent, and the media,” adding, “when he was with Marla Maples and we were going to write that they broke up, he cared more about ‘get my wealth in there, get the number right, how many billions I’m worth––that’s more important.’”
.. the gossip game was largely played on the barter system. To fill a blank page everyday for a city as high strung as New York, you can become somewhat dependent on publicists and managers and agents calling you and dropping a dime on someone so long as you were able to squeeze something in the column that helped them.
.. Having a PR flack sell out an A-List client’s extra-marital affair wasn’t odd at all, so long as I was able or willing to get one of their smaller, but vital, clients in the column. And God help them if I had a bit of dirt on one of their clients. Then the real negotiations began: “What are you gonna give me so that I bury this story and no one ever sees it?”
.. But the biggest difference in gossip, then vs. now, is we were more hung up on getting things right. Not so much getting things first.
.. I guess the aggravation he’s having now is see how much different it is trying to control ALL the columns, ink and electronic, rather than the wood, Page 2 or 3 and the more-pliable gossip columns.
.. I once said, he doesn’t check his pulse in the morning––he checks the papers to see if he’s alive. And that’s not a knock on him. Keeping your name in print in NYC has value.
..I’ve often said all columns should have a list of all the contributors who helped break, shape, and slant every story that began with a rumor or a tip. If that were the case, Trump would have a prominent position at the tippy top. But he wouldn’t be alone. More people than you think used to call me and just chat away over a cup of coffee.
.. What much of America hasn’t seen yet is the silly, compassionate, charming side to the guy.
.. The media ecosystem is ripe for takeover. The loudest, most popular voice usually wins. It’s no different than the atmosphere in a high-school cafeteria.
Give the crowd something to actualize their anger on and they’re off!
.. In general, people like getting angry––they’ll worry about the reason why later on.
..
Never before has the political world resembled a circus.
All Trump has done is put a face on The Strongman. And with everyone talking and gawking at The Strongman (or the anomaly), the circus gets a ton of attention, sells out every town, and rolls on without a hitch. I can’t see any other pol pulling this off or trying to adopt or whip up comparable anger. I don’t see anyone else with the same ego. And that’s saying a lot since everyone else who’s ever run for president have huge egos. But his is the size of Everest.
Interview with Matthew Gentzkow
Stanford economist on TV & children, TV & voting, politics & persuasion, and the vibrant future of media economics
Before Matthew Gentzkow entered the field, the economics of media was largely uncharted territory. Today, media economics is flourishing thanks largely to him and his co-authors—particularly Jesse Shapiro, a frequent collaborator
.. With unique insights, innovative technique, methodological rigor and massive databases he often creates for an express purpose, Gentzkow has answered questions about television, newspapers, product branding, competition, persuasion and politics that many scholars had asked but no one had answered convincingly.
.. Due to this work, we now know that newspaper media slant is driven mostly by the preferences of readers, not newspaper owners. And by examining browser data, he discovered that people don’t largely live in internet “echo chambers”—that is, they don’t exclusively visit sites that align with their political bent. Product brand preferences, he found, are established early in life and endure long after exposure to essentially identical, less expensive alternatives. These and dozens of other economic mysteries have yielded to his curiosity, insight and skill.
.. For the earlier paper, I developed a strategy of using the rollout of TV across different markets. In the United States, television was introduced to different cities in different years, basically because of idiosyncrasies in the regulatory process.
.. it’s hard to think of anything that determines how much TV kids watch that isn’t correlated with their parents, their environment, their intelligence. So, looking at a kid who watches four hours of TV a day and another kid whose parents don’t let him watch any TV—it’s hard to learn much from that.
.. you can’t talk about the effect of TV without thinking about what it’s crowding out. TV viewing is shifting time around.
.. it’s easy to imagine that for some kids, watching television is a much richer source of input than a lot of what it might be crowding out. TV has lots of language; it exposes them to lots of different people and ideas.
.. It’s also easy to imagine kids for whom it could be a lot worse than whatever else they would have been doing. Educated, wealthy parents or parents with a lot of time to invest in their kids might be taking them to museums and doing math problems with them and so forth. I think part of the reason so many people writing about this assume TV is bad is that they themselves are in the latter group.
.. Although there was some political content on TV, it was much smaller, and particularly much smaller for local or state level politics, which obviously the national TV networks are not going to cover.
So, we see that when television is introduced, indeed, voter turnout starts to decline. We can use this variation across different places and see that that sharp drop in voter turnout coincides with the timing of when TV came in.
.. the Internet as well, have increased particularly in national news and political coverage, these forces are pushing people toward paying less attention to local politics, local issues, local communities, and they’re being pulled toward either more entertainment options or more attention to national-level politics.
.. To try to separate those things, it seemed like you could learn a lot from looking at people who move from a place where one brand is popular to a place where another is popular.
.. another co-author of theirs, had written a really important paper in the Journal of Political Economya couple of years earlier that documented huge differences across U.S. cities in which brands are popular. They showed that that actually is correlated with the timing of which brands were introduced first in those cities, even though all of those introductions happened, for the most part, 50 or 100 years ago and few people remember a time when you couldn’t buy both.
.. The question then is, if somebody was born in a place where Coke is popular and moved to a place where Pepsi is popular, where does that person’s consumption fall in between those products, and how does that depend on how long they’ve been in one place or the other?
.. Then imagine somebody moving from a place where there’s low spending on health care to a place with high spending, and you see how things change
.. if I’m somebody who believes very strongly that global warming is a hoax or that the evidence for it is weak, and a lot of people I’ve talked to believe that global warming has been exaggerated, then if I see news outlets that are arguing otherwise, I’m going to trust them less. And if I see news outlets that are skeptical about global warming, I’m going to trust them more.
.. suppose the reason people in Minneapolis seem to have really low spending is, in part, that they are just healthy—they have better diets, better exercise, lower smoking rates or other, less-observable reasons why their health status is better. If they move to Texas, they’re going to carry that with them, and it’s not going to diminish or deteriorate as they live in Texas. It’s something innate or pretty fixed.
.. One of the things we found in looking at newspapers is that their political slant or political content seems to be driven very strongly by demand from their readers, the fact that people in conservative places want to hear conservative stuff and the converse for liberals. And that slant is basically uncorrelated with anything about their owners, the ownership of the paper.
.. It could be entirely consistent with those results that in other countries, in other contexts, it may well differ. Does Silvio Berlusconi influence the media in Italy? A lot of evidence suggests yes. Does control by the government of Russia affect the content of the media in Russia? Or even if we were to look at national cable outlets in the U.S., would we be confident that ownership doesn’t matter? I think that’s a pretty big leap; you need to be careful.
.. Rather, I’m watching it because I genuinely think it’s the most accurate source of information there is.
.. it’s very well documented historically that up until the late 19th century, newspapers were to a substantial degree funded by and explicitly controlled by political parties in this country.
.. As costs of printing newspapers fell dramatically, as the potential profits you could earn from selling newspapers increased, the incentive to instead focus on what consumers want got really big. So you saw a shift.
.. The data available to study media are typically very good almost everywhere. Media are funded by advertising, and advertisers need information about who’s watching and reading and what people are doing. So, no matter where you go in the world, people are keeping track of what are the TV stations and where are they available, the newspapers and their circulations, and just generally, what are people watching and how many people are watching different things.
.. It’s true that social media is significantly segregated; what people click on and see and share tends to be close to their own ideology. We know that social networks are very segregated ideologically, and social media reflects that. It just remains true that the share of news that people are getting through social media is still, on average, a small share of the total.
Trump has figured out how to provoke coverage
As we’ve just seen in the GOP primary, Donald Trump has figured out television commercials aren’t quite as necessary as usual if you can get your message out in between the commercial breaks.
He basically makes the television media cover him just about every day by offering some new controversy or revelation; he’s mastered the art of attaching himself to breaking news. A plane disappears, he asserts that it’s terrorism, and then a good chunk of the coverage is, “is this premature, did he jump the gun,” etc.
.. What really ought to worry Republicans is that Obama put his money into infrastructure and very targeted TV advertising — Lifetime, the Food Network, etc. — while Romney spent his ad dollars in broadcast television, and we saw how that worked out. Trump and the RNC need a GOTV infrastructure, and Trump claimed that stuff is “overrated.”
For example, right now there is no organized Trump general-election campaign staff in Ohio:
Facebook’s Subtle Empire
From this perspective, Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has become an immensely powerful media organization in its own right, albeit one that effectively subcontracts actual news gathering to other entities (this newspaper included). And its potential influence is amplified by the fact that this Cronkite-esque role is concealed by Facebook’s self-definition as “just” a social hub.
.. Beck is right that Facebook is different in kind from any news organization before it, and that traditional critiques of media bias — from the Chomskyite left as well as from the right — don’t apply neatly to what it’s doing.