Hot takes I agree with: The media isn’t fully to blame for Trump’s rise

One of the prevailing themes to this election is that we wouldn’t be where we are — with Donald Trump feasibly becoming the leader of the free world in just a few months — if it wasn’t for the media. The media gave Trump all sorts of free advertising during his run up to the Republican primary, and simply by fact-checking his ridiculous statements, viewers hear these statements over and over again, and these statements begin to permeate into the collective subconscious, even if proven to be factually incorrect.

It’s true, the media is to blame.

It’s also not the entire story.

As someone who worked in the media industry for two years, trust me, I’m as big an expert as there is. (Sarcasm comes across on Medium, right?) But in all seriousness, I did notice something that anyone in the industry will notice even if they work with a media outlet for just a few months. Clicks are king.

Now this is not ground-breaking news. Everyone (media or otherwise) knows “clickbait” is the scourge of the 21st century, and is the reason that Bleacher Report and Buzzfeed are the empires that currently are. (In credit to both, they have used their growth to actually start putting out quality content, as well, but we’re getting off track.)

So what does this have to do with Trump?

Well, Donald Trump is the nation’s clickbait.

When I worked at the Crookston Daily Times in Minnesota, we had one of the most interesting dichotomies I have been witness to. Whenever we posted a “negative” article — a crime committed in town, or an op-ed complaining about a local business — we would get blowback. People would ask us why we had to run these types of stories, why couldn’t we just focus on the positive things happening in the community?

We also got more web traffic than on any other articles.

People hated that we covered this negative news, but they also read the article, and sometimes even shared it to their Facebook page.

And that’s Donald Trump in a nutshell. People hate that the media keeps covering him, but it’s not at all that the CNN’s and MSNBC’s of the world want to cover Trump, it’s that they have to. It was the same for the small town newspaper. It’s not like traditional media is a booming industry these days, anything that is going to get the clicks that these stories — whether that be a small town crime or Donald Trump — are going to get, simply can’t be ignored.

If you listen to NPR, you hear the hosts constantly complaining about having to talk about Trump again, but guess what, if they did ignore Trump, folks would flock to another podcast or radio station.

So next time you blame the media for the rise of Trump, realize that it isn’t really the media’s fault. The media makes for an excellent fall guy, but the media only produces what human nature wants to read. If we, as a country, decided to ignore Trump, and never click on another article with his name in the headline, CNN would be ecstatic. They could go back to the journalism they almost certainly find more fulfilling. If we, as a country, decided to read only the in-depth, well-researched articles in The New Yorker or The Atlantic, that’s what the mainstream media would start to have on their front page.

Instead, we have fallen for Trump and the clickbait that comes with him.

Blame the media all you want, but it might just be time for our country to look elsewhere when it comes to the true reason for Trumpmania in the media.

Like the mirror.