This is changing. Indeed, in Europe and elsewhere, the main radio and TV channels are still owned by the state.Media in the US are in a country for old rich men. In some cases, as with Canada’s CBC, they cling to a few percentage points of audience. If he does, his logical next step would be to create his own cable news channel. Hatred of President Hillary Clinton would be the backbone of political coverage, with Peter Schweizer’s detailed exposé of where the Clintons made their money as a major text, to be plundered for stories and discussions. The judgments that it would seek to shape, the voices it would try to agitate, the political forces it would strive to organise would shape the world at least as powerfully as the largely liberal media of much of the 20th century.Probably even more attractive for Trump is the prospect of commanding a megaphone that could underpin a renewed presidential bid in 2020. Its news is slanted but usually informative. They have views that are angry, rooted in their own experiences and disappointments and that crave both expression and stimulation.”That “base”, many millions strong, is the key. Media and politics have become inextricably bound, with charismatic and telegenic leaders like centre-left Prime Minister Matteo Renzi in demand. And organise.
The irony That was the very mission articulated by none other than Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union, as his vision for a workers’ press.Can Trump find a similar gap in the market Fox is formidable, but has lost its guiding spirit, the 76-year-old Roger Ailes, to charges of sexual predation. Agitate.Politics, as a new book by the New York Times CEO (and former BBC director-general) Mark Thompson claims, is more based on emotion, powerful soundbites and attack-dog maulings than it has been in the past; reasonable argument has been progressively marginalised. That tycoon’s descent into the political arena in the early 1990s was an audacious bid to secure both political immunity for his many ventures, which might (and RG22/U Cables in some cases did) face legal challenges, and, more enduringly, to reshape politics through the media. Educate.The cable-channel project offers large lures, one of which is high returns. Polls indicate that Donald Trump will lose the US presidential election. Trump hasn’t just called into political being a new audience: He has used that audience to road-test streams of fantastic claims, promises and insults — and have them vindicated by adulation.But as his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was quoted as saying at a New York dinner party, “The people here don’t understand what I’m seeing. The Federal Communications Commission no longer intervenes on issues involving content or news balance, while public broadcasters — including the still-mighty BBC — are cutting and shrinking. They are voters, mainly white, from across the economic spectrum, brought to political life by the Trump campaign. The discussions are abrasive but can be enlightening, even rational.Foreign coverage would focus on favoured leaders and movements: Vladimir Putin of Russia, Jaroslaw Kaczynski of Poland, Nigel Farage of the United Kingdom, Marine Le Pen of France, Beppe Grillo of Italy, Viktor Orban of Hungary.
Besides, Fox, for all its snarling presenters, retains many of the trappings of the mainstream media..Yet fantasy is precisely the power a Trump News Network — TNN — could mobilise. And by appointing Breitbart News executive Steve Bannon as his campaign’s chief executive, Trump brings into his orbit “a haven for people who think Fox News is too polite and restrained. Logic isn’t fate, as few know better than he, and putting a 24/7 network on the air is neither easy nor cheap. Rather than follow the conventional news agenda — as Fox News usually does — TNN would make its own news hierarchy.Broadcasting, for much of the postwar period, has been regulated by the state. If he feels too old for the rigors of another run by then — he would be 74 — he would have the still potent role of a kingmaker who could fashion a candidate in his mold. It is sufficiently respectful of facts to question Trump’s fantasies.”The crossing of fantasy claims with coruscating revelations could give birth to an extraordinary media child. If he does, his logical next step would be to create his own cable news channel. TNN, were it to get off the ground, would be the latest manifestation. (Ailes now advises Trump on his campaign. You go to these arenas, and people go crazy for him.Trump would follow a path already mapped by former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.Thus immigration would be ruthlessly milked for its downsides — immigrants, or their children, who became “terrorists”, violent immigrants, immigrants who misuse federal and state funds, immigrants who take jobs away from decent Americans.5 billion — nearly four times that of the estimated $381 million of its nearest rival, CNN, and more than seven times that of the left-leaning MSNBC, at $227 million.Polls indicate that Donald Trump will lose the US presidential election.Berlusconi, 80 this month, still commands the largest part of the fragmented right, but his legacy is a political doctrine that plays out mostly on television.” In the same vein, an un-named media person, reportedly consulted by Trump on the feasibility of a new channel, has confided that “win or lose, we are onto something here. We’ve triggered a base of the population that hasn’t had a voice in a long time. Fox News, founded 20 years ago, identified a new audience on the right and made an estimated profit in 2015 of $1