Entretanto
sabemos que o debate nào correu bem a Trump e que a sua “arte”,
pelo menos neste caso, não foi efectiva …
OVOODOCORVO
The
art of defrauding America
Reality
TV star turns liberal media values and voter cynicism to his
advantage
Edward Luce
SEPTEMBER 25, 2016
by: Edward Luce
In the Art of the
Deal, Donald Trump’s get rich quick guide, he explains how to
seduce the customer. “People want to believe that something is the
biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular,” he wrote. “I
call it truthful hyperbole.”
At the presidential
debate on Monday night, roughly 100m Americans will be exposed to Mr
Trump’s magical thinking. The US can be great again by electing the
best dealmaker in the world. Some will see it as a con trick. Others
will be willingly gullible. A worryingly large share will care little
about his truthfulness either way. Since all politicians lie, Mr
Trump could hardly be worse than Hillary Clinton.
That, in purest
form, is today’s voter breakdown — a world apart from the
founding fathers’ informed citizenry. In the hunt for the mother of
all deals, Mr Trump has two key partners. The first is the media.
Conservatives believe the conventional media suffers from deep
liberal bias. Most journalists probably are on the left by their
measure.
But that is
irrelevant. Mr Trump’s genius is to grasp that television’s
desperate quest for ratings outweighs any ideological leanings.
Leslie Moonves, chairman of CBS, put it well earlier this year. Mr
Trump’s celebrity had worked miracles on the network’s
advertising revenues. “It may not be good for America,” he said.
“But it’s damn good for CBS.” In an age of ever-thinner gruel
for the TV business, Mr Trump offers repeated sugar highs. Monday’s
record ratings will have little to do with Mrs Clinton.
The reality TV star
has also turned liberal media values to his advantage. Fox News pays
lip service to being even-handed. CNN, on the other hand, balances
liberal voices with credible opposing ones.
At a time of acute
polarisation, such false equivalence is gold dust to Mr Trump. He may
run a pay-for-play charitable foundation but so do the Clintons. He
may refuse to release his tax returns. But Mrs Clinton hid a private
email server. After a while, everyone seems equally bad. In reality,
the Clinton Foundation raises billions for philanthropic causes and
its published accounts meet industry standards. Mr Trump, on the
other hand, has used his to make political donations, buy portraits
of himself and settle law suits. It is possible details of his serial
“self-dealing” — painstakingly chronicled in the Washington
Post — will sway some voters. But they will have to switch off
their TVs first. Short of an Edward Snowden-type leak from the
Internal Revenue Service, voters will never see his tax returns.
Mr Trump’s other
key ally is public cynicism, which is also fuelling the media’s
ratings crisis. In 1954, the career of Joseph McCarthy, the senator
behind the “red scare” witch-hunts, came to a sudden end in a
televised hearing when an attorney proclaimed: “Until this moment,
Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or recklessness.
Have you no sense of decency, sir?”
It is hard to
imagine what — or who — could publicly shame Mr Trump. The
gatekeepers have gone. In those days, figures like Walter Cronkite,
the legendary news anchor, could turn opinion with a morally charged
soliloquy. Mr Cronkite’s authority drew from a middle ground that
no longer exists. It hinged on the public’s trust that it was
possible to be objective. In the absence of such trust, the best Mr
Cronkite’s successors can do is resort to a hollow “he said, she
said” neutrality — or drop the pretence altogether. This, too, Mr
Trump plays like a violin.
US election poll
tracker
Which White House
candidate is leading in the polls?
Will it work on
Monday night? Quite possibly. Most of today’s TV anchors say it is
the other candidate’s job, not the moderator’s, to correct
factual errors. Their favourite analogy is a sporting one in which
best game is where the umpire’s role goes unnoticed. But the
comparison does not stand up.
No soccer game would
last a minute if it were up to the players to call out the opposing
team’s fouls. A fair referee will discipline players on merit. If
it means one team gets six yellow cards and the other only two, so be
it. Nor will a referee be intimidated by the booing of the offending
team’s fans. By all accounts, Lester Holt, the NBC anchor, who will
moderate the first debate, will try to be fair-minded. But Mr Trump
is playing games with his head. Mr Holt is a Democrat and therefore
biased, he says, although voter records suggest that Mr Holt is a
Republican. The whole event — and the general election — is
probably rigged in Mrs Clinton’s favour, he claims.
It is worth
marvelling at how well Mr Trump has played a conventionally weak
hand. He has branded CNN, which devotes just four per cent of its
Clinton coverage to her policies — a third of what it has allocated
to her email scandal — as biased. He calls it the Clinton News
Network.
The leading outlets
devoted more airtime to Mr Trump’s assertion that Mrs Clinton
created Isis, than to her policies for defeating it. The first was
Trumpian invention. The second is serious business. But Mr Trump
grasps a truth about today’s low-trust democracy that still eludes
others. People want to be entertained. “I play to people’s
fantasies,” Mr Trump wrote in his best-seller. On that playing
field, Mrs Clinton’s edge disappears.
As a species we are
always vulnerable to deception. Remember those Weimar types in early
1930s Germany? None of them could hold an audience.
edward.luce@ft.com
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