Mutual Dependence

The Mutual Dependence of Donald Trump and the News Media

By JIM RUTENBERG

Did you catch the Trump-Kelly bout Friday night? What a show.

It had Donald J. Trump, The Likely Republican Presidential Nominee, throwing the first punch (of that day) at the star Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly by composing a Twitter post describing her as “overrated” and calling for a boycott of her show.

Then Fox News Channel counterpunched, accusing the candidate of having a sexist and “sick obsession” with its popular journalist. Boom. Another Trump News avalanche!

The Trump-Kelly feud once again became a focal point of the presidential campaign coverage, cascading across Twitter, cable news and digital news outlets, including this one.

As in any good prizefight, everybody came out the richer Friday, putting aside the potentially severe internal injuries.

Mr. Trump riled up his fans against a recurring villain in his running campaign narrative and ensured the news was once again all about him. Fox News, the cable news ratings leader that is so often impugned as an arm of the Republican Party, got to ring a bell for journalistic independence. Ms. Kelly got the sort of support from the network that she has described as lacking from her colleague Bill O’Reilly; guaranteed big ratings to come; and got more fodder for the book she sold for many millions of dollars after the Trump feud began.

Newspapers and online news organizations got a click-worthy story line tailor-made for a fast read on the iPhone. And, finally, there were the viewers and the readers, who are benefiting from a transitioning media industry’s desire to give them what they want, where they want it, as fast as possible. As the people have made clear, they want Trump.

It was the perfect boil-down of the disturbing symbiosis between Mr. Trump and the news media. There is always a mutually beneficial relationship between candidates and news organizations during presidential years. But in my lifetime it’s never seemed so singularly focused on a single candidacy. And the financial stakes have never been so intertwined with the journalistic and political stakes.

Of course, the situation is unique because Mr. Trump is unique. His pedigree, his demagoguery and his inscrutable platform — including the proposed mass deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants — make him a giant story.

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. I’ve been struck by just how much uncertainty there is as I’ve talked to people across the mediasphere in preparation for lacing up the size 12s that are so closely associated with this space, last worn so smartly by our departed colleague David Carr (P.S., they feel O.K., will take a little getting used to). Things are changing so fast that no news organization knows whether the assumptions it’s making to secure its future will prove correct.

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.”

And Mr. Trump knows how to wield power. Just as his success at the polls is pushing the Republican Party to reassess its very identity and break with long-held traditions, he is using his ratings power to push the news media to break from its mission of holding the powerful, or really just him, accountable. In other words, to loosen its standards.

We take those standards as a given, but they were established during more economically secure times, when the traditional media was flush and could dictate the terms of news coverage to advertisers, the people it covered and its audience. That leverage is slipping away.

Once you understand that, you can understand why Fox News — which has gleefully broken with traditional journalistic values since its founding by Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch — appears to be taking the lead in resisting Mr. Trump’s demands.

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.

It still plays to win and knows where the ratings are. So plenty of its shows feature Mr. Trump, and enjoy cozy relations with him (lookin’ at you, Sean Hannity), contributing to a roughly 40 percent prime time ratings spike over last year. But Fox was not desperate for those ratings.

CNN entered the campaign season in a very different position. Some 18 months ago Wall Street analysts were questioning whether the network, then sinking near 20-year ratings lows, had a place in the new ecosystem of “unlimited real-time information,” as my colleague Emily Steel wrote at the time. With CNN’s debates and heavy coverage of Mr. Trump, the network’s ratings have increased about 170 percent in prime time this year.

That’s more than a reason to boast; it’s an adrenaline shot to the heart.

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.

It certainly has to take the sting out of the criticism that CNN has handed its schedule over to Mr. Trump, which is a little unfair in that it is hardly alone. 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.

True, plenty of Mr. Trump’s “free media” has included some good, tough reporting on him, if belatedly. That reporting has had no noticeable effect on his rise (not that it’s the job of the news media to stop him).

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. That was new.

One imagines that if CBS and ABC had 24-hour news channels, they would have gone along for the embarrassing ride, too. Because, surprisingly, the broadcast networks, fighting for relevance, have appeared to make some of the most fundamental compromises.

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. The network said it made the decision because of its own strained relations with the newspaper, but Mr. Trump took credit, leaving the dangerous impression that he had the power to muzzle uncooperative journalists.

Then there are the Sunday morning public affairs programs. For decades they have served as proving grounds where candidates must show up on camera, ideally in person, to handle questions without aides slipping them notes, their facial reactions and body language on full display. It’s why the programs were named “Face the Nation” and “Meet the Press” — not “Call the Nation” or “Phone the Press.”

And yet, as the campaign began in earnest, 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.”

“I just thought even if we took a ratings hit — and to some degree we did — it was a line worth holding,” Mr. Wallace told me.

On Friday, Chuck Todd, the moderator of “Meet the Press,” told me he had only grudgingly allowed Mr. Trump to call in to his show earlier in the campaign, determining that he would rather have Mr. Trump take questions via phone than not at all.

Now, Mr. Todd said, he will no longer allow Mr. Trump to do prescheduled interviews by phone on the NBC program. And CNN told me it would think twice before giving full coverage to a Trump news conference that devolves into an infomercial.

I thought I might be witnessing a midcampaign course correction. But then I tuned in to “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” on ABC and there was Mr. Trump, or, that is, his disembodied voice.

None of this is meant to let newspapers off the hook. In our rush to find new digital readers via iPhones and tablets, we are adding to the Trumpian churn. When Mr. Trump called Ms. Kelly “Crazy Megyn” on Twitter last week, for instance, it was just another in a long stream of derogatory posts about her. Not really news. Yet The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico and others did separate news reports on it — giving Mr. Trump an audience well beyond his own seven million Twitter followers and contributing to what ultimately became Friday night’s big fight. (Even Mr. Trump believes it is “the craziest thing” how “I do a tweet on something, something not even significant, and they break into their news within seconds,” he told my colleague Maureen Dowd last week.)

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.”

Sure, given her ratings, Ms. Kelly can afford to take a stand for journalistic independence. Can everybody else afford not to?