Running for Your Life: Ratings Extremists

Consider this as a path to the undoing of America.

The unfettered primacy of TV audience ratings.

With no viable public control of the airwaves – the BBC and CBC being time-tested good-government examples of non-ratings-based national news systems – America, instead, relies on these ratings for its news (entertainment?). If the ratings are high, then that program (currently all things Trump) will receive outsize attention. Why? Because it’s “damn good” business.

The veil on what is being presented as responsible news and analysis is rarely lifted. But during the recent presidential campaign, CBS boss Les Moonves did so when he said:

“It (a Trump presidency) may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

Ratings worked to keep Trump in the public eye for days, hours on end, last winter, spring, summer and fall.

Hillary’s ratings were not so high, in contrast. In fact, she seemed to think the less she saw the red light of the camera the better: that her critics would savage her (often unfairly, at times less so) and eat into her national poll lead.

Those historically high ratings – drawing millions more “eyeballs” than any other modern presidential candidate – helped create a wave of populist fervor (not just “support,” Trumpists are in a fever over their guy) and a swing to extreme politics the likes of which we living Americans have never seen.

Trump, in keeping his pledge to these followers, is tending to his base. Heretofore, we thought of “a base” as an aggregation of moderate, level-headed citizenry. The change that this national vote wrought is to replace that temperate base with an awakened and galvanized fringe that creates an unstable equation of national affairs that is both unfamiliar and untested.

Do the major US news networks race ahead to dissect this disturbing, emerging reality? Perhaps, if the idea can be sold to the news bosses. That is, if real resource dollars are spent on real news programming.

Alas, though, what we’re more likely to get are bosses who chase the easy bucks dictated by our Extremist Ratings System.

No presidential candidate theater, no problem. Cover the stagecraft of the White House news conferences, pony up time to the Kellyanne Conways.

Or, better yet, satirize Trump and his inner circle.

SNL ratings have hit a six-year high. Yippeeee! And do the comedian celebs’ increasingly Trump-bashing skits move the needle toward a more recognizable America, the one we wonder if it has been lost forever?

I would hazard to say no.

I’m not advocating the muzzling of SNL. Far from it. But it’s a cheap ratings play.

What’s needed instead is a view of the bigger picture that comes from a news media that is not reduced to the business imperative of extreme ratings.

Next: Run for Your Life: New Leader of the Free World