Media Factored Into Trump Win In Many Ways

Donald Trump, who vilified the news media even as he brilliantly manipulated them to rally his passionate followers, confounded pollsters and pulled off one of the greatest presidential upsets in American history, defeating odds-on favorite Hillary Clinton.

For once, the events got ahead of the numbers crunchers, pollsters and decision desks at the TV networks. Before they could make up their minds on whether Trump had amassed the necessary 270 electoral votes, Clinton conceded the election to Trump — a fact that CBS News reporter Major Garrett reported at 2:41 a.m. ET this morning.

It became official when shortly thereafter Trump walked on to a stage at the New York Hilton Midtown and gave a surprisingly gracious victory speech, praising Clinton for her toughness and service to America, promising to “bind the wounds of division” and thanking his supporters.

(Oddly, CBS News felt it had to superimpose a slide over the video midway through the speech to make its official announcement that Trump had won. By then, it was old news. Bolder than the networks, AP had called it for Trump at 2:30)

His improbable victory became increasingly apparent as Tuesday evening wore on and the Republican candidate began turning major battleground states like Florida, Ohio and North Carolina red.

By 1 a.m., it was Clinton who faced the long odds of having to “run the table” of the remaining big battleground states to pull out the victory.

It was not to be.

A political novice, Trump made his fortune as a real estate developer, a brand and as reality TV star. (He hosted NBC’s The Apprentice and Celebrity Apprentice from 2004 to 2015).

But he has little love for the “mainstream media.” At his rallies, he made reporters the targets of ridicule and anger, charging that they were liars and in cahoots with the Clinton campaign.

“I’m not running against Crooked Hillary,” he said last summer. “I’m running against the crooked media.”

The attacks resonated. Making the rounds on social media this week was the picture of a Trump backer with a T-shirt that read: “Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some Assembly Required.

In his private business, Trump has been notoriously litigious. During the campaign, he threatened to sue the New York Times for reporting on his alleged serial groping of women.

If elected, he vowed to “open up libel laws” to make it easier to sue media, although making public figures more vulnerable to libel action would likely require a Supreme Court ruling.

When AT&T announced in October its $85 billion bid to buy Time Warner, Trump immediately said he would block the deal, noting that it owned CNN. “It’s too much concentration of power in the hands of too few.”

In the same speech, he threatened to revoke favorable sales tax treatment of Amazon, whose CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, and he said he would “look at breaking up” Comcast-NBCU.

That latter concentrates “too much power in one massive entity that is trying to tell voters what to think and what to do,” he said. “Deals like this destroy democracy.”

Along with Univision, Comcast cut business ties with Trump shortly after he kicked off his campaign last year by suggesting most Mexican immigrants were “rapists” and criminals.

Whether he follows through with such threats or any of the many other sometimes vague and contradictory promises he has made over the past 16 months remains to be seen.

Whatever his agenda, he will have Congress on his side. It turned out that he had coattails. The long night ended with the Republican Party poised to control not only the White House, but also to maintain control of the House and the Senate.

Like all presidents, Trump will derive much of his power from his ability to appoint more than 8,000 bureaucrats in the legislative and executive branches, starting with the cabinet. The jobs will all be listed in the so-called Plum Book that the government publishes after each presidential election.

Two of the plum jobs, that of attorney general and head of the antitrust division at the Justice Department, will have much to say over which media mergers pass muster and which do not.

Of greater importance to most media, including broadcasting and cable, is what will happen at the FCC.

President Trump will appoint a new chairman at the agency, either by elevating one of the two sitting Republican commissioners (Ajit Pai and Michael O’Reilly) or bringing in a third Republican after Democratic Chairman Tom Wheeler gives up his seat as is the custom.

One name that has emerged as at least an adviser on media matters is that of Jeffrey Eisenach, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. Politico described him as “an avowed crusader against regulation” and “an outspoken antagonist of FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and his policies.”

Broadcasters may have one of their own at the table when appointments are being made and policy set. Stanley S. Hubbard, the CEO of Hubbard Broadcasting, was a six-figure contributor to the Trump campaign. “I think he’ll get rid of a lot of regulation and throw out a lot of the nonsense,” he told Fox Business News in June.

Trump not only upset Clinton, he also upset many axioms of modern presidential campaigns. He relied heavily on “earned media” generated by his unmatched ability to command their attention with one politically incorrect pronouncement after another and lampooning of opponents.

To the chagrin of many broadcasters, Trump did not raise as much money as the Republican nominee was expected to, so he didn’t spend as much on local TV spots.

It was Clinton who took the conventional route, raising as much money as she could and outspending her opponent by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Because Trump’s victory comes as a surprise to many and because he is the ultimate outsider with no Washington experience or history, pundits must now turn to speculating about the Trump presidency with little to go on.

“I think it is the beginning of a new era whose shape and form and content are not known to us and are not clear, whose personnel and exact direction are unknown,” said former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, who provided some of the color for the CBS News play by play.

Nonetheless, she added, “Something huge and incalculable has happened this evening.”