The shift in media’s business model played a critical role in Trump's victory

Like many populist leaders, Donald Trump skillfully exploited the media obsession for immediacy and page views.

In French journalism, especially in radio and TV, we have an expression that says it all: “He (or she) is a bon client”. Literally, a good customer, an endless provider of soundbites and juicy quotes that will jump to the top of the news cycle. The most spectacular, the semantically simplest wins the prize. The “good customer” delivers strong, punchy lines. These can be superficial and even untrue, but only the tune matters, not the lyrics. That has been the case for countless populist leaders, from the French alt-right Marine LePen, to Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte and, of course, Donald Trump.

Across the board, the media love such fodder. Including mainstream, legacy news outlets. Years ago, draping themselves in the sanctity of journalism, these news organizations kept deriding the clickbait news machines that arose from the internet. “We are not in the same business, they are craving for clicks, we do serious journalism”.

Today, the lines are blurred. Digital native outlets contribute to good journalism — Buzzfeed, to take one example, has landed numerous great pieces over the last months — but legacy media have largely succumbed to the dictatorship of traffic growth, hence the appeal of the “good customer”.

Let’s consider the following charts. The first one comes from The DataFace, a tiny dataviz operation. It simply measured the number of articles produced from July 2015 through September 13, 2016 by “serious” media outlets: New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Slate, Politico, Fox News and the Weekly Standard.