Scapegoat du Jour

I take a certain mordant pleasure in watching Mark Zuckerberg and his minions scapegoated for the political failures of late-Obama-era liberalism. But the liberal establishment’s fixation on Facebook’s 2016 sins [..] still feels like a classic example of blaming something new because it’s new when it’s the old thing that mattered more. Or of blaming something new because you thought that “new” meant “good,” that the use of social-media data by campaigns would always help tech-savvy liberals and not their troglodytic rivals — and the shock of discovering otherwise obscures the more important role that older forms of media played in making the Trump era a reality.

No doubt all the activity on Facebook and the apparent use of Facebook’s data had some impact, somewhere, on Trump’s surprise victory. But the media format that really made him president, the one whose weaknesses and perversities and polarizing tendencies he brilliantly exploited, wasn’t Zuckerberg’s unreal kingdom; it wasn’t even the Twitter platform where Trump struts and frets and rages daily. It was that old pre-internet standby, broadcast and cable television, and especially TV news.

Start with the fake news that laid the foundation for Trump’s presidential campaign — not the sort that circulates under clickbait headlines in your Facebook feed, but the sort broadcast in prime time by NBC, under the label of reality TV. Yes, as media sophisticates we’re all supposed to know that “reality” means “fake,” but in the beginning nobody marketed “The Apprentice” that way; across most of its run you saw a much-bankrupted real estate tycoon portrayed, week after week and season after season, as a titan of industry, the for-serious greatest businessman in the world.

Where did so many people originally get the idea that Trump was the right guy to fix our manifestly broken government? Not from Russian bots or targeted social media ad buys, but from a prime-time show that sold itself as real, and sold him as a business genius. Forget unhappy blue collar heartlanders; forget white nationalists and birthers: The core Trump demographic might just have been Republicans who watched “The Apprentice,” who bought the fake news that his television program and its network sponsors gladly sold them.

That was step one in the Trump hack of television media. Step two was the use of his celebrity to turn news channels into infomercials for his campaign. Yes, his fame also boosted him on social media, but there you can partially blame algorithms and the unwisdom of crowds; with television news there were actual human beings, charged with exercising news judgment and inclined to posture as civic-minded actors when it suits them, making the decision to hand day after day of free coverage to Donald Trump’s rallies, outrages, feuds and personal attacks.

Nothing that Cambridge Analytica did to help the Trump campaign target swing voters (and there’s reason to think it didn’t do as much as it claimed) had anything remotely like the impact of this #alwaysTrump tsunami, which probably added up to more than $2 billion in effective advertising for his campaign during the primary season, a flood that drowned all of his rivals’ pathetic tens of millions. And as cynical as I believe the lords of Silicon Valley to be, the more important cynicism in 2016 belonged to those television execs who were fine with enabling the wild Trumpian takeover of the G.O.P., because after all Republicans deserved it and Hillary was sure to beat him in the end [..]

It’s also clear — as the economists Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro wrote in these pages late last year — that among older white Americans, the core demographic where first the primaries and then the general election were decided, television still far outstrips the internet as the most important source of news. And indeed, the three economists noted, for all the talk about Breitbart’s influence and Russian meddling and dark web advertising, Trump only improved on Mitt Romney’s showing among Americans who don’t use the internet, and he “actually lost support among internet-using voters.” In a sense, you could argue, all those tweets mattered mainly because they kept being quoted on TV.

Which is not to say that the current freakout over Facebook doesn’t make a certain kind of sense. Beyond the psychological satisfaction of weaving [..] Silicon Valley into stolen-election theories, there’s a strategic wisdom to the center-left establishment’s focus on the internet [..] the big tech companies regard themselves as part of the liberal cultural complex, so they’re vulnerable to progressive bullying and shaming [..] In the end, as Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote recently for National Review, one implicit goal of the Facebook freakout is to ensure that “conservatives and populists will not be allowed to use the same tools as Democrats and liberals again, or at least not use them effectively.” If the trauma of Trump’s victory turns social-media gatekeepers into more aggressive and self-conscious stewards of the liberal consensus, the current freakout will have more than served its political purpose.

But like the television channels whose programming choices did far more than Facebook to make Donald Trump president, it won’t have served the truth.

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Whenever a new communications medium is born, panic follows. Witness the collective freakout when America learned that a firm called Cambridge Analytica had used some deceptively procured Facebook data to create what the Guardian dubbed “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool.”

Facebook feeds lit up with outraged Hillary Clinton voters announcing that they were shutting down their accounts because Facebook didn’t care about privacy or the integrity of American elections. To judge from the outrage, one might have thought all this had occurred during an actual war. One might also have thought Bannon had a weapon straight out of some paranoid thriller, a machine capable of bending the human mind to its will.

What he actually had? Voter targeting based on what people liked and shared on Facebook.

“The idea that we’re going to profile your personality sounds like a spy novel, and is extremely compelling to would-be spymasters like Steve Bannon,” says Patrick Ruffini, cofounder of Echelon Insights, a conservative polling and analytics firm. The problem, he says, is that psychological traits don’t necessarily give you great insight into voting behavior — at least not any better than other traits, such as socioeconomic status and community of residence, that political campaigns have long targeted.

“Those are the things that most smart analytics people are focused on,” says Ruffini, adding after a pause: “But psychographic targeting sounds cool.”

Facebook, of course, lets you target exactly those boring, old demographic qualities without having to steal any data from them; all you have to do is buy some Facebook ads. Which both 2016 campaigns did extensively without anyone worrying that their minds were being warped.

Sure, but . . . mightn’t the Cambridge Analytica data have given Donald Trump that little extra he needed in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania? Well, Ted Cruz was the firm’s original client in the 2016 election, and he spent nearly as much as the Trump campaign did; if they’re really the masterminds so many seem to believe, how come he’s not president?

The Time for Change model I used predicted a non-Democrat win. The outcome could have changed if Dems campaigned at Dubya levels, but that was not in the cards. In terms of politicking, it was a tie - no easy feat for a political upstart like Trump, effectively tying the Clinton machinery that way. Her organization was better, his messaging had an advantage. In the absence of political winner, time for change effect was in full-swing - the incumbent party had lost its glitter. Why? Democrats keep wanting to be like Republicans.