The press will lose to Donald Trump, Piers Morgan writes
'Good publicity is preferable to bad,' said Donald Trump in his best-selling book Art of the Deal, 'but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all. Controversy, in short, sells.'
Never has this mantra seemed more appropriate than today.
Trump's savagely personal assault on the US mainstream media - aka the MSM - in the past week has ignited a firestorm of controversy and bad publicity.
It began when he tweeted that MSNBC's 'Morning Joe' host Mika Brzezinski was 'low IQ crazy Mika' and claimed she had been 'bleeding badly from a face-lift' during a New Year's Eve visit to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort.
This was obviously a grotesquely offensive thing for the President of the United States to publicly state about anyone.
Trump's latest fight with the media began when he tweeted that MSNBC's 'Morning Joe' host Mika Brzezinski (left) was 'low IQ crazy Mika' and claimed she had been 'bleeding badly from a face-lift' during a New Year's Eve visit to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort
To say it about a woman, any woman, also smacks of crass misogyny.
But before we martyr poor Ms Brzezinksi too fervently, it is worth pointing out that she herself is no innocent little lamb in the personal abuse stakes.
The reason for Trump's tirade was that she spent the previous day's 'Morning Joe' repeatedly mocking him for his 'teensy hands'.
In fact, she devotes a lot of her time to ridiculing Trump for the way he looks and behaves.
And let's not be naïve here, she does it knowing full well that Trump will eventually re taliate, and when he does, she and her show will dominate the news for a few days and get a substantial ratings boost.
Those increased ratings lead to increased profits.
Controversy, in short, sells.
Trump responded to the inevitable furore with another stinging tweet about Brzezinksi and her co-host and fiance, branding them 'Crazy Joe Scarborough and dumb as a rock Mika'.
Now, I happen to think Scarborough and Brzezinksi are two very smart and able broadcasters. But since their old friend Trump won the White House they've gone rogue on him. Why? Partly because I believe they genuinely have issues with the way he has started his presidency. But also, I suspect, because MSNBC is making a fortune from whacking the president.
Over the weekend he re-tweeted a mashed-up viral video of an old clip of him at a World Wrestling Entertainment event in which he appears to be pummeling an opponent, who now has the CNN logo on his head
Indeed, at the weekend Joe Scarborough was able to boast on Twitter about record ratings for their show.
Trump then turned his Twitter turret sights onto his favored enemy: my old employers, CNN.
They gifted him a massive PR goal last week by firing three top journalists for an entirely false story linking a Trump associate to Russian financial skullduggery.
And, as I predicted, the president has embarked on immediate ball-spiking frenzy.
'I am extremely pleased to see that @CNN has finally been exposed as #FakeNews and garbage journalism,' Trump tweeted. 'It's about time!'
Doubling down, he re-tweeted a mashed-up viral video of an old clip of him at a World Wrestling Entertainment event in which he appears to be pummeling an opponent, who now has the CNN logo on his head.
Trump leaves his battered opponent lying on the ground and walks off triumphant.
'#FakeNewsCNN,' was his simple, scathing caption.
This sparked outrage, not least from CNN who said in a statement: 'It is a sad day when the president of the United States encourages violence against reporters. We will keep doing our jobs, he should keep doing his.'
But Trump, who recently had to endure CNN star Kathy Griffin posing for a photo with his mocked-up severed head, would argue that challenging the hyper-aggressive, and in his case, endlessly mocking media IS part of his job.
Trump, who recently had to endure CNN star Kathy Griffin posing for a photo with his mocked-up severed head, would argue that challenging the hyper-aggressive, and in his case, endlessly mocking media IS part of his job
At a rally in Washington on Saturday night, he made his position crystal clear. 'The fake media is trying to silence us. But we will not let them because the people know the truth. The fake media tried to stop us from going to the White House. But I'm president and they're not!'
The partisan crowd leaped to their feet and cheered.
I don't agree that networks like CNN or NBC, or papers like the New York Times are 'fake news'.
But they are all driven by a very liberal view of life.
And what the MSM forgets, or chooses to ignore, is that there are vast swathes of the co untry that don't share those liberal views.
These are the swathes that voted for Trump and all the polls suggest they would do so again tomorrow.
The more the MSM self-indulgently clears their news schedules to pompously fume and rage about Trump's attacks on them, the more people outside the liberal elite media bubble just shake their heads in amusement or dismay at what they see as rank hypocrisy.
The American public have good memories.
They know what happened in the election campaign when the MSM competed to give Trump as much friendly airtime as they possibly could.
Back then, the MSM loved candidate Trump's incendiary tweets because that gave them another ratings-surging bone for their pundits to gnaw on all day long.
They lapped it up when Trump branded his opponents 'Little Marco', 'Lying Ted' or 'Low Energy Jeb' - more outrageous headlines, more outrageous ratings, more outrageous profits.
Controversy, in short, sells.
Then Trump won the GOP nomination and everything changed.
The MSM, having joyously played along with the Trump Train for months, suddenly realised to their horror he might actually win the presidency. Even worse, THEY might get the blame!
So they abruptly turned on him and tried to kill the monster they had themselves created.
To their delight, they found that Trump-bashing was even more popular than Trump-slathering.
Negative headlines came thick and fast, and ratings soared ever higher, as did profits.
Controversy, in short, sells.
Trump, as his is way, fought fire with fire.
The harder the MSM punched him, the harder he punched back.
After Trump won the White House, I hoped there might be some kind of truce called between these warring parties. Fat chance. The battle has grown ever more ferocious, the rhetoric ever more vulgar
And to HIS delight, he found that HIS popularity rocketed too. So much so that he ended up beating Hillary Clinton, the 'most qualified candidate in presidential history'.
Controversy, in short, sells.
After Trump won the White House, I hoped there might be some kind of truce called between these warring parties.
Fat chance.
The battle has grown ever more ferocious, the rhetoric ever more vulgar.
On both sides, it's ugly, puerile, self-obsessed and frankly, pathetic.
Yet they continue doing it because they're all winning.
The MSM's relentless Trump-bashing is driving record newspaper subscription numbers, and cable news and late night show ratings.
But Trump's winning too, because his base likes nothing more than their guy standing up to the big, bad media beast and going at them toe-to-toe, slug-for-slug.
Controversy, in short, sells.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world looks on in bemused horror and wonders what the hell is happening to America?
As someone who worked with and likes Donald Trump, and who worked for and likes CNN, I don't have a sensible answer to that question.
But I do know this: Trump is deliberately sucking his media foes into a spiders-web from which they will not be able to easily escape.
He's got the MSM all mindlessly hooked on his drug of choice: Twitte r.
Trump knows ego-fuelled journalists can't resist his abusive and personal tweets about them, and so long as they obsess about those then they are not doing their real job, which is to examine the issues most important to the American people like healthcare, jobs or immigration.
It's a rough, tough, occasionally very nasty strategy that provokes perpetual outrage in the hysterical liberal community still reeling from the fact he ever won the presidency in the first place.
But it's also crudely very effective.
I was down in Florida recently and they love Trump more than ever.
They especially love him beating up on the MSM.
As one of the very few people to repeatedly predict Donald Trump had a good chance of becoming President of the United States, let me now make another prediction: if t he MSM in America continues to make the biggest story in town their own mutually abusive battle with Trump, it will help not hinder him and he will be re-elected in 2020.
Controversy, in short, sells.
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