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| Donald Trump |
"If he could regularly have a media operation that would have 3 million people watching that would be successful."
With recent polls showing Hillary Clinton maintaining a sizable lead over Republican rival Donald Trump, many Democrats are predicting a landslide win in November.
And, if Trump does lose, many in the GOP
establishment are hoping the brash and unpredictable real estate mogul
turned reality TV star will just go away. But Trump is unlikely to do that.
Instead, with his ever-tighter ties to former Fox News chairman Roger Ailes (who is now reportedly advising
the Republican candidate) and his recent hiring of former Breitbart
chairman Steven Bannon, there's a growing chorus, propelled by a report
in Vanity Fair, saying that Trump's endgame is not the nation's highest office — but to have a right-wing media outlet of his own.
If Trump lost in November and then launched his own media operation —
a plan his campaign has repeatedly denied — what would it be exactly?
And would it be a success?
"Losing in November would be the best thing that
could happen, from a business standpoint," said Jon Klein, former
president of CNN's U.S. operations. Klein, who is currently the CEO of
TAPP, the subscription-based online video network that launched Sarah
Palin's now defunct channel, added, "It would only increase the passion
of his most hard-core supporters, and it would give them a juicy target
to rail against for the next four years."
If Trump were to launch his own media venture, we don't know what
form it would take: cable TV, the internet, or something else entirely.
But Klein said the internet subscription route —
in the style of Glenn Beck's Blaze TV, in which a small (by web and
cable TV standards) audience pays a monthly fee for behind-paywall video
content — would be highly successful in that it would eliminate the
cable or satellite middleman so viewers could better "connect deeply and
directly with their hero."
Whether or not an internet video network would be high-profile enough for the attention-hungry Trump is another question.
"It's hard to imagine if Trump were to be looking to build a media
operation that it would be anything [except] small," said Brian Wieser, a
senior analyst of advertising, media and internet at Pivotal Research
Group. But to start an actual television station would cost hundreds of
millions of dollars at least, which begs the question, "How much money
does he really have? How much in liquid assets?" said Wieser. Trump
routinely claims to be worth $10 billion, though that figure is highly
suspect.
Robert Thompson, a professor and director of the
Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse
University, predicted a cable network would be unsuccessful for Trump in
that it's an enormous, expensive undertaking and it's already a very
crowded news environment. And "for many millions of Americans the Trump
brand is already tarnished," he said.
On the other hand, "You need fewer people to make a hit night on
cable television that you do to be elected president. If he could
regularly have a media operation that would have 3 million people
watching that would be successful," he said of Trump. That's not an
outlandish number to imagine — after all, some 14 million people voted
for Trump in the GOP primaries.
And there's another angle, too. Trump the
candidate loves to skewer the media, frequently calling it "dishonest"
and "corrupt." He's arguably foreshadowing a "problem" that he can
"fix."
Trump is "already setting up a narrative, that
the media is corrupt and the system is rigged against him. The natural
transition is 'we need a platform to be heard,'" said Kurt Bardella,
Breitbart's former spokesman who quit earlier this year and has been
highly critical of Trump. The hiring of Bannon certainly indicates that
Trump is considering a media entity for his base, he added.
And there's no doubt Trump would love the attention of being not just a business mogul, but a media honcho, too.
"What Trump is happiest doing is running for
president, not being president — but running for president," said
Thompson. "Part of that has to do with him being in the media
spotlight."
culled from: http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/donald-trump-could-win-big-even-if-he-loses-election-n638326
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