Donald Trump — the Information Policy of the Current US Administration

If the now former president Barack Obama won his post as the most influential man on the planet thanks to an unprecedented use of social media and guerrilla marketing of his personality, Donald Trump, both during the election and today, remains at the centre of controversy and of more than one politically incorrect faux pas in new and old media alike. While Obama was rewarded for his feat in 2008 by the American Association of National Advertisers as marketer of the year^[1], Trump has more than once had to explain in the media the real meaning of some of his Twitter posts. However opposite these political campaigns may be on the surface, they have at least two things in common: not only did they grasp the importance of new media, but in both cases they also helped the candidates win the election.

Obama’s media team, however, used new media for a strategically different reason. From the start Obama had a very promising and believable story, which only needed to be made visible and sold well. As a (half) African American he had reached most of the possible milestones of American life, known collectively as the “American dream”, and thereby represented the view, or rather the hope, of many people that America had gradually entered a post-racial phase in which people from minority communities too can truly achieve their goals as long as they give it their all (we see here an appeal to the undying, thoroughbred American and Protestant work ethic). If the slogan “Hope” referred to anything, it was the hope of showing once and for all that the States had successfully healed from their history of oppression and racism. Shortly after his election Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize^[2], which highlighted his effort to choose dialogue and cooperation instead of military intervention, in which he differed noticeably from his predecessor. Yet this Nobel Prize will rank among the most controversial, for it was precisely under Obama that people began to speak more loudly about another information-technological instrument of government, namely unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, which in the course of “Obama’s drone campaign”^[3], as we now know, not only killed hundreds of civilians^[4][5][6], but led some influential commentators on political affairs, such as Prof. Noam Chomsky, to declare repeatedly that Obama’s drone campaign is “the most extensive global terrorism campaign the world has seen”.^[7] Under Obama’s government, new and old media also brought a radical deterioration in race relations, for videos recorded on smartphones allowed a far too rapid judgement of a situation without waiting for the official and more rational verdict of a court. Gallup statistics show that during Obama’s time in office the number of people who “worry a great deal about [bad] race relations” roughly doubled^[8]. Last but not least, a stain on Obama the Nobel laureate was left by the scandal over the surveillance of American citizens and world leaders, which the Snowden affair brought to light.

The starting situation outlined above, into which Donald Trump entered as a presidential candidate, is also one reason why Trump’s election campaign and its potential use of social media turned out to be more “disruptive” than it might seem. Certainly, Trump did not need new media to show the American voter who he was, since for decades he has enjoyed a mass popularity comparable to that of pop stars. Trump used Twitter and Facebook differently. Paradoxically, he used them the way we had always imagined them: as alternative channels, resistant to censorship, that strengthen democracy and freedom of speech and make it possible to spread even unpopular opinions. And spreading unpopular opinions is something Trump certainly did. From this point of view it might seem that Trump is an example of a working democracy: he won even though no major print media officially endorsed him, while de facto all of them endorsed his opponent Clinton^[9]. The fact that Trump bypassed all the big “legacy” media and still won the election ought to be, for all theorists, a phenomenal result worth a more detailed analysis, especially since all the standard polls and predictions also failed, for even shortly before election night they gave Trump almost no chance; with the exception of Nate Silver and his FiveThirtyEight website, the only ones who gave Trump a chance of around 29 %, whereas the New York Times, for example, gave him between 1 and 15 %^[10].

Besides his Twitter account, Trump had one more weapon in the field of new media, or rather several weapons at once: YouTubers and purely online news sites. From roughly the summer of 2016 I began to look more closely at which people and what online content motivate potential voters to vote for Donald Trump. The group of people who rallied around Trump began to call themselves the alternative right, alt-right for short. They are people who saw in Trump, and many still see in him, the symbol of a man who can stand up to globalist tendencies that push the State as a unifying unit into the background, and who instead prefer more or less radical elements of nationalism. However we judge this vision and this faith in Donald Trump, this agenda was at the centre of Trump’s support, at least in online circles. Among the most influential online media arguing for Trump I would include the following websites and YouTube personalities: Breitbart News, Infowars, Richard Spencer, Milo Yiannopoulos, Stefan Molyneux and many others.

Not only do these online channels match the print media in the number of their followers, they were also often helped by the low self-discipline and inaccuracy of the print media, which showed itself more than once during the election and after it: when, for example, CNN during the election campaigns ignored Bernie Sanders’s speech to thousands of supporters and instead, at that very moment, broadcast the empty stage of Donald Trump’s campaign, where people were still waiting for him to arrive^[11]; when the influential New York Times edited an already published article (without an explicit editor’s note, as is standard practice in the field) so that it sounded more negative^[12][13]; or when the Washington Post published articles about alleged Russian hacking of power stations in the state of Vermont^[14], which would have been an international scandal, perhaps bordering on an act of war, had it all been true and not a lie.

The number of scandals among the traditional giants of print journalism, and their irresponsibility, were great. Partly because of negativity bias^[15] people remember stumbles, or outright deliberate lies, far more than quality, objective reporting. In the information age, information has quantitatively greater power than ever before. That brings problems with it too: information overload. More and more, people outsource thinking about events to their chosen media channels, which logically serve as a filter and a “medium”, in the true sense of the word, to the “real world”.

If these filters lose trust, people can either turn elsewhere — to alternatives that are native online media — or make use of the increasingly popular option of so-called fact-checkers, which conceptually represent a kind of “meta-media”, for they report on how other media report.

Distrust of the media and the fight against so-called fake news are the point where politics and information meet in President Trump’s administration. Trump’s supporters are at least as sceptical of the traditional media as he is himself. Thanks to the strong political mandate that Trump and the Republicans now hold in both chambers, and to the fact that Republican voters express a strong aversion to the media^[16], Trump can afford, in his proposal for the federal budget, to end funding entirely for public broadcasting services such as Public broadcasting National Public Radio (NPR) or the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)^[17]

One point of view would call such a step an attack on freedom of information; another, let us say market-oriented one, would argue on the contrary that after scandalous inaccuracies and the spread of fake news the State should not run public institutions and should not force taxpayers to pay for particular media, but should instead give them a choice. Rather than an authoritarian step, this is a clash of political and economic ideologies. The libertarian or conservative current of Trump’s administration is thus in fact doing nothing other than implementing its programme, which won the election. In the context of the Czech Republic such a step would be scandalous, but let us not forget that context plays a role, and the American view of a relatively small State and of conservative economic programmes is somewhere else entirely: historically a few centuries away, socially and culturally several thousand kilometres.

As a relatively independent observer, I see in the abolition of public media institutions a certain continuity with more global changes in the way people consume information. Can we expect the classic “old” media to stay with us forever? If it turns out that people use them less and less, should they not transform themselves as soon as possible so as to respond to what people want, and I do not mean in terms of content now, but of form, of mediality itself? If State-sanctioned institutions are abolished, some will find here far too much market freedom, too much choice, in which it will be impossible to tell objective facts from lies. As soon as that lighthouse to which everyone looks up to help them tell truth from untruth disappears, a demand for its replacement will arise. Information overload is enormous, and people need to outsource the analysis of information to someone else.

It is precisely here that I see an interesting potential for the future direction of freedom of information in the USA: web projects devoted to fact-checking will not only multiply but also improve in quality, since it is precisely the quality of sources, analysis and explanation, including evident political independence, that will be the main economic assets of these projects, which may come close to the standard academic peer-review process. All that is needed is a suitable platform. If, moreover, it is open, resembling open academic peer review, the initial destructive step may lead to something new, something that, among others, the staunch opponents of Trump’s administration demand in one way or another with regard to information: Open Access, accuracy, transparency and freedom.

Such thinking is, on the one hand, speculative; on the other, it tries to go beyond the traditional way of thinking that responds to political steps only through what reflects and fulfils my current political programme and ideology. If the budget is approved and public media institutions are gradually dissolved as a result, the opponents of Trump’s administration should, besides the traditional protest marches, which unfortunately have not been free of violence in recent days, understand this situation as an opportunity to use new media to re-design the mass distribution and reception of information specifically for the 21st century. If I am not mistaken, it has always been the left that thought in futurist and utopian terms. And the Trump era gives these two modes of thinking plenty of stimulus and material.  

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