Illustration: Kali Sullivan
While watching the debate last Wednesday night, I had a flashback to my junior year of high school. I had written a column for my school newspaper deriding a proposed presidential debate hosted by Donald Trump wherein I resigned myself to the fact that debates would eventually become reality TV programs. Using some fresh-in-2011 context, I wrote, “it might end up like Jersey Shore, where people look down on [the candidates] but still watch, making them national celebrities.”
That’s essentially what happened with the most recent Republican debate. An estimated 23 million people tuned in to watch Donald Trump call Rand Paul ugly, Jeb Bush admit he got high “at least once,” and Carly Fiorina allude to a non-existent brain harvesting scene in a Planned Parenthood video. It’s hard to tell exactly how many people came to see substance instead of the circus, but in the case of the on-campus debate viewing at the Healey Family Student Center, the split seemed about even.
Now, I understand the idea that these debates are compelling, even bankable, television. I eagerly anticipated watching this debate as if it were a sporting event. But CNN, as well as any other network hosting a debate, has an obligation to challenge candidates and press them on substance. While moderators Jake Tapper, Dana Bash, and Hugh Hewitt did a good job at times challenging candidates on substantive issues (like abortion and marijuana laws), the debate seemed to go out of its way to provoke conflict asking questions that prompted candidates to respond to the views of their counterparts rather than forcing them to outline their own opinions. This seemed to lead to candidates criticizing each other’s respective records rather than defending their own.
The problem is that serious issues fell almost entirely by the wayside. Foreign policy was given incomplete coverage, as Russia, Syria, and Iran came up occasionally (most notably when Ted Cruz butchered the name of Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei), but pressing concerns like the Syrian refugee crisis went unmentioned. Other issues, including voting rights, racial justice, gun control, and education were glossed over quickly.
The above list includes some of the most important issues and news events of the last few years, and yet hardly a word at the debate was devoted to any of them. We have seen at least two cases of racial tensions that erupted into weeks of mass media coverage with the violence in both Baltimore and Ferguson. The media also spent many days covering numerous instances of perceived police brutality, but the issue of racial violence was not even brought up at Wednesday’s debate. This summer alone, we’ve witnessed shooting massacres in Charleston and Chattanooga, but none of CNN’s three moderators challenged any candidate on their loyalty to the NRA.
But there is no reason for debate hosts to even bother with policy questions. For networks to draw eyeballs to these events, there has to be conflict. Cable news execs must still be downright giddy because of Trump’s outsized role in this race, since Trump personifies the merging of politics with reality television perfectly. Substance, ideas, reason, and logic mean nothing in today’s media universe, where anything longer than 140 characters or a few seconds of audio takes too long to process, and feeding frenzies develop over the smallest tidbits of political gossip. Trump has sucked up the attention of the news media by playing to these sad truths, whether it’s introducing himself in the debate by saying “I’m Donald Trump, I wrote The Art of the Deal,” or high-fiving Jeb Bush and Ben Carson.
Our politics have borrowed from our social media. The candidates most likely to succeed are the ones who can get their point across and promote themselves in the shortest amount of time. Future elections may be decided less by debates, editorials, and full speeches and more by tweets, sound bites, and GIFs. Candidates also have increasingly less need for interviews, as social media’s triumph over traditional news media allows them to control their message with exactitude. Down the road we may have “Republican Idol” or “Dancing with the Candidates,” as reality television and politics continue to merge into one singular entity.
The reason, I think, that 23 million people tuned into Wednesday’s debate had little do with policy. People wanted to see the spectacle. They eagerly anticipated the next insulting or closed-minded comment to come out of Trump’s mouth, or a shouting match like the one Chris Christie and Rand Paul had in their first debate. Our popular culture values conflict. It’s what has fueled the rise of phenomena like conservative talk radio in the 1980’s, “trash TV” shows like “Jerry Springer” and “Maury” in the 1990’s, and reality shows like “Hell’s Kitchen” and yes, even “The Apprentice” in the 2000’s.
Even now, entertainment rooted in conflict continues to endure. If you were to check the most recent Nielsen TV ratings data from the week of September 7, most of the top ten programs on network TV related to football—a violent bloodbath of a sport played by numerous domestic abusers, dogfighters, and performance-enhancing drug users. On cable, conflict-driven programming dominates the ratings as well— college football games, pro wrestling, and Bill O’Reilly’s daily ravings on Fox News combined to take seven of the top ten spots. With the way Wednesday night’s debate went, it will no doubt fit right in next week’s top ten.
The Democrats have yet to debate, but I get the feeling that they will not fall to the reality TV concept just yet. Sure, President Obama rose to prominence as a “rock star candidate,” but most of that was based on the presentation of his ideas. The same is true for the rise of Bernie Sanders, who, like Trump has gained traction by running against the establishment, but has done so by running on substance rather than style. Sanders’ speeches have emphasized issues like economic inequality, affordable college education, and infrastructure funding. Rather than attempting to find conflict, Sanders has reaching out to people with different views, including in his speech earlier this month at Liberty University.
The best solution seems to be to treat Trump and his ilk for what they really are—trolls. And I’m not just saying this because Trump’s mane resembles that of a troll doll. Trump may not be running exclusively to mess with the American public, but he is provoking conflict and attracting attention to himself by making incendiary comments to rile people up. Anyone who’s explored an Internet comments section knows that this fits the definition of trolling. And those people also probably know that the best way to make a troll go away is to ignore him or her. On an individual level, you and I are not going to do very much to make Trump go away. The national media, however, needs to step up and move on to other issues. Eventually he’ll get the hint. It’ll be our way of telling him, “You’re Fired.”
Roey Hadar is a junior in the SFS.
He didn’t get the hint