Lessons Learned?

 

     It is well known that the media played a major part in the rise of Donald Trump and his eventual winning of the 2016 election. Donald Trump started out as a new and relatively little-known figure in the political realm only to become a household name within a matter of weeks after the announcement of his campaign for president. All this also happened despite Trump spending a fraction of the money on advertising as other major republican candidates. Much of this was due to the incredible amount of “free” or “earned” media coverage he received which totaled to nearly $2 billion by May 2016 even while he spent a mere $10 million on advertising. Contrast this to Jeb Bush who spent eight times as much on advertising but only received $214 million in free advertising from the media. One might think though, wasn’t much of this coverage overtly negative for Trump? While yes, much of the coverage was negative, it still served Trump’s campaign by providing him with essential components to a successful political campaign such as increasing name recognition across the country and positioning himself to the public as a candidate with a decent chance of winning the election. Since then, there has been a significant amount of discussion and recognition by political pundits and the rest of the mainstream media about the role they played in Trump’s rise. Some in the media went as far as to prepose that the media restrain itself in its coverage of Trump as they were inadvertently giving him too much coverage. Given this, however, it is interesting that the media seem to be falling right back into the same habits with one of the new presumed GOP front runners and challengers to the Democrats in 2024: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

     Over the last year and especially in recent months, the mainstream media has started to cover stories involving Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. While many of these stories are either neutral or cast the governor and his actions in a negative light, they are still providing free media exposure for the governor. While DeSantis has not announced that he is running for the GOP nomination for president in the 2024 election, it is becoming clear that he is certainly positioning himself to do so, and the media are certainly covering him as though he is likely to. Coverage of DeSantis perhaps reached its greatest degree yet on April 10^th with the New York Times publishing a piece with a profile of DeSantis and a discussion of his potential as a GOP front runner. This begs the question. Is the media doing exactly what they did with Donald Trump? Is DeSantis, a popular political figure in Florida but previously little-known outside of the state, going to rise to nation-wide popularity through increasing media coverage over the next few years? He is certainly well on his way if the New York Times is any indication.

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