The study “The last remaining thing we have in common: journalists publicly perform their addiction to former President Trump” by Ron Bishop from Drexel University Philadelphia was a rhetorical analysis of news stories from 2016 to 2021 where journalists deployed the addiction metaphor to describe their relationship with the former president Donald Trump.
With his and his followers’ relentless attacks on the press as ‘fake news’, journalism during the reign of Trump was not easy. The Trump administration went to great lengths to convince the public that the media could not be trusted or even that the journalists were personally bad people.
In response to this onslaught, the media could deploy a series of defenses. Groenhart and Bardoel, revisiting Coombs’ continuum of tactics that journalists may use, suggest refutation, evasion, mitigation and confession as strategies to restore the public’s trust and convince them of the credibility of news. The author adds one additional strategy: commiseration. In it, journalists seek to put themselves ‘in the same boat’ as the audience and build trust together.
Despite the difficult atmosphere for news, Trump also drove the sales of news, being extremely polarizing and thus interesting figure. Even after Biden was elected and took office, journalists have remained fixated on the former president and the possibility of the 2024 election since.
The study looked at newspaper articles that deployed the addiction metaphor to describe the relationship between the journalists or the audience and president Trump. A complete corpus of 46 texts was chosen for analysis.
Addiction remains a topic that normally carries a stigma: an addict is typically considered to be helpless and in need of an intervention in many narratives about addiction. The topic was in the foreground during the Trump presidency even coming from the administration: Trump himself described his grief over the loss of his alcohol addicted older brother Fred at the age of 47.
The author finds the zeal in which journalists cover Trump to be understandable: newsrooms saw their revenues go down with the advent of the Biden presidency and ‘normal’, dull political reporting.
The covering of Trump has also improved, according to Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post. Rather than tiptoeing around the volatile Trump and being worried about access to press conferences, journalists, since the January 6 insurrection of 2021, were more readily using the word ‘lie’ to describe the claims made by the former president.
The anxiety felt by the journalists as they seek to ‘walk the tightrope’ in covering Trump confirms the utility of the commiseration strategy. There is a sense of balance as journalists confirm their addiction to Trump and Trump himself seems addicted to power. money, attention and adulation, or even, as the author speculates, Adderall.
The author concludes that with commiseration, there is less of a priority to re-establish journalisms standards of practice – rather, the journalists self-consciously present navelgazing and reality tv version of news about the topics that energize the audiences. Journalists seek to create a sense of victimhood along with the audience (of Trump’s behavior) rather than seek to explore how coverage should improve. Myth of addiction is more clickable than sober reflection.
The article “The last remaining thing we have in common: journalists publicly perform their addiction to former President Trump” by Ron Bishop is in Atlantic Journal of Communication. (free abstract).
Picture: Donald Trump, from Wikimedia Commons.