ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the ways in which the Trump campaign changed political media coverage. From Trump’s tweets, to his relationship to alt-right media, to the rise of propagandistic fake news, the 2016 primaries greatly transformed political media in our country. On broadcast news, Trump so often set the tone and content for coverage that many viewers turned to satirists for more balance and nuance. To make sense of the way in which the traditional news media covered Trump, this chapter documents how the news media have changed since the Walter Cronkite era of straight news journalism. From the advent of cable news to the complexities of social media, news media coverage has undergone a series of shifts that coalesced together to make Trump a news sensation. In fact, the story of the Trump presidency is as much a story about our changing media landscape as it is a story about a shift in politics.
