Are they yelling in Atlanta?

Norman Podhoretz, New York Times profile, March, 2017

Margaret Sullivan points out that Jeff Zucker played a crucial role — perhaps second only to that played by Mark Burnett — in transforming Donald Trump from a washed up bit of cultural detritus from the least appetizing parts of 1980s celebrity culture into an utterly fake tycoon, who was given a media launching pad he would use to eventually destroy democracy in America:

Two decades ago, as an NBC executive searching for a way to goose the floundering network’s popularity, he gave the green light to a reality show, “The Apprentice,” featuring a flashy mogul whose soon-to-be-famous tagline was “You’re fired.” Trump had a checkered history of bankruptcies, racism and failed real estate projects, but his confident bluster made him a natural on television.

“The show was built as a virtually nonstop advertisement for the Trump empire and lifestyle,” Washington Post journalists Marc Fisher and Michael Kranish wrote in their 2016 book, “Trump Revealed.” The stunning rise of Donald Trump had begun.

Zucker created Trump the TV sensation, which was the necessary foundation for Trump the candidate. Years later, after moving from NBC to CNN, Zucker recollected very well that Trump was a self-proclaimed “ratings machine” — a rare instance of Trumpian truth-telling.

CNN infamously took his campaign speeches live, sometimes going so far as to broadcast images of an empty lectern with embarrassing chyrons such as “Breaking News: Standing By for Trump to Speak.” You can’t buy that kind of media.

Zucker also brought on the air Trump surrogates who should have had no place on a national news network: people like the bully Corey Lewandowski, the sycophant Jeffrey Lord (who praised Trump as the Martin Luther King of health care) and Kayleigh McEnany, who later became a White House press secretary bad enough to somehow make one pine for Sean Spicer.

When Trump became the Republican nominee for president and started trashing Zucker’s network and staff with invective about its “fake news,” it was too late for second thoughts. By then, the standard had been set. Every Trump utterance became breaking news, and CNN, like many other news organizations, never figured out how to responsibly cover Trump throughout his democracy-damaging presidency.

Zucker expressed a modicum of regret in late 2016. “If we made any mistake last year,” he said, “it’s that we probably did put on too many of his campaign rallies in those early months and let them run.”

But he excused his decision-making: “You never knew what he would say.” Audiences were riveted, so what could he do?

Over the past few years, we’ve all had many occasions to be reminded of Paddy Chayefsky’s and Sidney Lumet’s eerily prescient 1976 satirical film Network. “Television will do anything for a rating,” Chayefsky explained in an interview after the film was released. “Anything!”

The most perverse aspect of the infotainment world that Network foresaw and that we’re living through now is that it destroys any sense in the public that running a government actually requires some real expertise — that it’s not at all the same thing as the fantasy world of reality TV, where a fake billionaire can bark “you’re fired!” at people who are participated in a melodrama that’s every bit as scripted as any soap opera.

One way to drive this point home is to consider the following hypothetical: If Nick Saban were to resign as the University of Alabama’s football coach, would even the Trumpiest of Alabama football fans be OK with naming Donald Trump as his replacement? The answer of course is that, with the exception of a very tiny fringe of genuine lunatics, Alabama fans would unanimously consider that idea completely insane on its face.

Of course Donald Trump can’t be the next head coach of Alabama football — he doesn’t know anything about being a head football coach at a major college program, which is a really hard and complicated and most of all important job. I mean are you crazy?

But Donald Trump obviously didn’t know the first goddamned thing about presidenting before he was elected POTUS, and this self-evident fact gave these same people no pause whatsoever!

Why?

One reason is that a lot of people who are perfectly capable of recognizing that there’s a lot of specialized skill and knowledge involved in being a high-level football coach simply don’t recognize that being president of the United States isn’t just some matter of Leading With Leadership, like it is in the movies, and that electing an “outsider” to “shake things up” makes about as much sense as putting somebody who knows absolutely nothing about coaching a major college football team in charge of a major college football team.

Another closely related factor is the cult of the CEO, which assumes that government is just another form of business, and that a “great businessman” is the perfect person to put in charge of that business.

There’s of course a double level of deep fallacy here, since not only is government not at all like a business, but even if it were Donald Trump’s great skill in business is a complete fiction, generated by the ratings-hungry infotainment complex that people like Zucker have spent their lives constructing, and getting immensely wealthy from.

A third factor is that some voters are genuine chaos agents, who may well recognize that Trump is an incompetent buffoon, but he’s also a nihilistic racist and misogynist, who is going burn down the whole system while hurting the right people. For this subgroup, the fact that putting Trump in the White House was as crazy, in terms of normal considerations of competence, stability, etc., as making him Alabama’s head ball coach was a feature, not a bug.

Yet a fourth factor, and perhaps the most crucial and interesting at all, is that Alabama football fans who vote for Trump would never be OK with Trump succeeding Nick Saban, because the vast majority of such people care way way more about who the coach of Alabama is than they do about who the president of the United States is. I have absolutely no doubt that this is true, and if you do that’s because you don’t much about sportsball, and/or the average American’s level of knowledge about and engagement with national politics.

That is the world that Jeff Zucker et. al. have wrought: a world in which politics is cheap and trivial entertainment, not nearly as important or interesting as Alabama football, or whatever else it is that people actually care about.