Reporters may hate it, but a Trump White House is good for their bosses

The election of Donald Trump may be a nightmare for most of the media who rooted against him during the campaign, but for executives far up the organizational chart tasked with maximizing profit, his victory is a victory for basically every outlet in the business in money is the ultimate measure.

What’s that you say? Media bias is a myth only held by some on the right?

{mosads}You might want to check out the most telling media perception poll of the 2016 campaign: The one by USA Today that asked 1000 likely voters, “Who do you think the media is rooting for, Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump?“

Answer: Clinton. By a 10-to-1 margin including a majority of Clinton supporters who could see the historic media pile-on from a mile away.

A Hillary Clinton victory would have warmed the hearts of the (just an educated guess) 90 percent of the press cheering her on and backing up that sentiment in their work and words, sure. But her presidency would have been very much like her candidacy: One shrouded in secrecy shunning those covering her in the process. Precedent for such an opinion: Her campaign media strategy.

Clinton once went 287 days without holding a press conference. Context: Math says one could walk across our newest ally, Mother Russia, in that amount of time with 37 days to spare. For you NFL/Fantasy football fans like me, one could play not one, but two NFL seasons in that time.  A full-term pregnancy happens in a shorter period of time.

You get the idea … Clinton was risk-averse. Homogenized. Prepared and packaged. Taking a bold or unconventional stance on anything usually doesn’t test with the focus group folks well.

From a media perspective, this means — outside of controversies about her damn emails and the Clinton Foundation — a Hillary presidency would be the very definition of boring, of predictable.

And boring ain’t good for ratings or clicks. The right would still attack her, of course. But that’s a 25-year-old narrative. Wikileaks told us everything else about her inner circle. With the genie already out of the bottle on the characters in the Clinton Administration and the cake already baked in terms of perception, viewers and readers would have found other ways to infotain themselves outside of political theatre.

With Trump, we get very much the opposite, even in a week since his acceptance speech where he has barely spoken publicly.

On the cable news front, one would think they were looking at numbers leading up to the most highly-anticipated election of our lifetime, and not with it in the rearview mirror.

Fox News and CNN finished first and second, respectively, in all of cable news in total viewers last week, beating juggernaut ESPN. MSNBC finished fifth in all of cable, its best ranking ever.

The New York Times may have disgraced itself to the point its publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, had to send a pseudo-apology to readers assuring them they will really try to cover Trump fairly for now on. The paper has done quite the opposite as noted here, of course, but Trump trumps all when it comes to viewer and reader interest.

As a result, the Times and the Wall Street Journal — which just recently downsized due to a plunge in print advertising — are reportedly seeing sizable increases in post-Election subscriptions.

The Huffington Post, which once relegated Trump to its entertainment section for months and gave the candidate a 2 percent chance of winning in its not-compromised-or-anything “election forecast” on the morning on November 8, reports that the New Yorker registered 10,000 new subscriptions in just three days since the election, a new record for 91-year-old publications. 

Even Saturday Night Live saw its best rating of the year in its first post-election program. Irony: it was the highest-rated SNL since November 7, 2015. Guest host that evening: Donald Trump.

November 8th: Trump wins. Hillary loses. Media wins despite though the candidate they loathe defying all the negative coverage that redefines the definition of a pile-on.

And in the end, a rising Trump lifts all boats in the press pool, which despite needing shock treatment and plenty of chlorine to get the stench off its patently poor ethical perception, will continue to bring in the dough with a Republican in office to attack for the next 515 weeks.

And to those sitting in corner offices well above the newsrooms, anchor chairs and editorial boardrooms, money and profit trumps integrity and objectivity every time.