It was inescapable. Over the last 18 months,??? ?? the media covered Donald Trump more aggressively than anything or anyone else, in terms of both sheer volume and breadth of work.
That was the problem.
In the immediate aftermath of an election where the media wholly turned on the eventual president-elect, the question looms large: How'd the media get it so wrong?
Well, David Fahrenthold at the Washington Postdidn't get it wrong. Neither did Maggie Haberman at the New York Timesor Brian Stelter at CNN. Katy Tur at NBC News didn't get it wrong, and she worked under some of the toughest conditions a journalist will face outside of a war zone.
They and many others generated some of the finest journalism of the year at the country's biggest news outlets. In bygone eras, their work would've set the tone for the election, dominating news cycles for weeks or months.
This time around, it was all just a drop in the bucket of the absolute tsunami of coverage that Trump generated. The sheer volume of work — spurred on by Trump's ability to create new headlines on an hourly basis — overwhelmed any chance for the best journalism to hit home.
It was, as Simon Dumenco of AdAgesaid way back in September, a DDoS attack of information.
"Trump is a one-man DDoS attack on the media; he bombards the media-industrial complex so relentlessly that everything just kind of freezes up and falls apart," he wrote.
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In retrospect, that idea now appears to be half right. Trump, it turns out, is more of a source code, much like the Mirai attack that helped take down the internet just weeks ago. He was the perfect exploit for the modern media age.
A quick refresher: In October, millions of internet-connected devices (think cameras, DVRs, etc.) launched a massive cyberattack on a key piece of internet infrastructure. It's a kind of attack known as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), which aims a flood of traffic somewhere to render particular systems unusable. This was done through a source code known as Mirai, which looks for connected devices with weak security and then turns them into zombies (in techspeak, a botnet), ready to attack at a single command. When the attack began, the internet systems had trouble figuring out which traffic was legit and which was part of the zombie horde. And it all ended up as noise.
Looking at how the media covered Trump, the similarities are eerie.
It didn't just seem like Trump-focused media had drowned out everything else — it did. Trump articles were seeing massive readership and engagement online thanks in part to a combination of reader demand and plenty of supply, as Mashablereported.
That coverage ranged from the aforementioned excellent campaign beat journalism, to the op-eds and hot-takes, to the outright fake news that percolated on Facebook. The media served as the internet-connected devices through which Trump could send near-constant traffic. Narratives changed seemingly by the hour, meaning more stories and more traffic crowded out the legitimate work being done, and legitimately important stories being reported on.
Even as someone who watches the media constantly and knows which journalists to watch, keeping up with the news and trying to remain focused on important topics proved near impossible. Facebook became useless and Twitter wasn't much better.
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This certainly isn't the only issue with how the media covered the election, and there's surely a reckoning coming for polling. Cable news networks will need to figure out what it'll do in a post-election world (though a Trump presidency could help). The not-so-slow death of local news is clearly starting to affect our larger understanding of the U.S.
The digital botnet of modern media, however, can't be ignored. It's a structural problem no single entity can do much about. It's ruled by the still-evolving digital consumer and advertising markets. Much like the world of internet-connected devices, it's still evolving, and much like that world, there are growing pains (and serious security concerns) to consider.
It's a worthy metaphor to understand this part of the puzzle, but it's not reality. The reality's that the American media struggled to do its job, not because of a lack of rigor, or a lack of output, but because there was far too much of it — and far too much of it was garbage.
Does that mean anyone or anything can take advantage of this inefficiency? Not necessarily. Trump, like the Mirai code, is a particularly effective exploit — and one that often doesn't work multiple times. In fact, there were four different Mirai-based attacks against the campaign websites of Trump and Hillary Clinton recently that didn't amount to much.
Did this give Trump the election? It did not. Americans at the polls seemed to know exactly who they were voting for (or against) — and that a lot of them are just plain angry about how things have been going, and that anger extends to the media. More than three-fourths of Americans said in an exit poll that they believed the mainstream media was more interested in making money than telling the truth. From where they sat in this election, bombarded with coverage, it's not hard to understand why.
If we're lucky, history will judge this as a matter of perfect timing. Trump will have been the first candidate to come along to exploit digital media. No other candidate will be able to play the same trick, though perhaps no other candidate ever could.
If we're unlucky, the Trump exploit is just the first example of how modern media has evolved into a self-destructive monster, able only to make its own problems worse through endless repetition.
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