ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the structure of the neoliberal media – the “neoliberalized mediascape” – shaped CNN’s coverage of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign to make the election of Donald Trump possible. Predictable platitudes about the commercialization of journalism cannot account for the fact that an openly racist and misogynistic sexual predator with a following of self-proclaimed white nationalists assumed the presidency in 2016. This chapter describes a “perfect storm” of hypercommercialism and financialization that has in recent years made reality television the paradigm for journalism in general, and in which Trump’s own interests converged with those of the neoliberalized mediascape to help ensure his victory. The relentless logic of differentiation that drives hypercommercialism and financialization rendered CNN unable to meaningfully confront Trump’s attacks on the American social fabric, precipitating an epistemological crisis especially conducive to the fantasies of authenticity, patriarchal domination, and racial purity that helped propel him into power. What seem like “identity-neutral” aspects of neoliberalism and neoliberalized media, then – namely financialization and hypercommercialism – remain, in reality, inextricably bound to the very same white, patriarchal power structures from which they arose in the first place.
