For many years, a quote from author and screenwriter William Goldman has often been used as a handy way to sum up the Hollywood film racket.
The phrase Goldman used was "Nobody knows anything." It appeared in his 1983 book Adventures in the Screen Trade, about his experiences working on such acclaimed movies as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President's Men, and other films that never got produced. While it was repeatedly used to describe the organized chaos of the film industry, it specifically refers to Goldman's assertion that nobody really knows how a film will resonate with audiences and critics.
It's a phrase that could be applied to the American and, indeed, international media following the victory of U.S. president-elect Donald Trump. There has been hand-wringing, self-examination and acres and acres of punditry about how Trump was underestimated and how his appeal to certain voters wasn't on the radar of major media outlets.
The self-examination and puzzlement is particularly acute in television. Right now, there are two theories about Trump, TV and his victory – and maybe only one of them can be correct.
The first theory suggests that Trump was not particularly clever about using TV. Instead, television used him. His bombast and off-the-cuff blustering and rudeness is what gave CNN and other outlets staggeringly high ratings for candidates debates and coverage of the Republican primaries. Focusing on the Trump campaign was good for business and ratings because there was the element of surprise and the element of viewers being appalled, but gripped, by Trump and his antics.
If that theory is accepted, then the major mistake of TV reporting and punditry was in failing to understand the disgruntled voters to whom Trump's easy answers and boastful declarations appealed.
The competing theory is that Trump knew exactly what he was doing and he played the TV news outlets like fools. He had a strategy and it was a cunning one. It worked.
The existence of a specific strategy has been given credence by renewed attention, since the election victory, to a report by the website Politico in February of this year. The report, based on interviews with unnamed attendees at a meeting with Trump in 2013, puts forward the view that Trump knew exactly how to use television to his advantage.
The meeting between Trump and "New York political operatives" was to discuss the possibility of him running for governor of New York. He wasn't interested and declared he'd run for president instead. When asked if he was prepared to spend time doing itsy-bitsy events to connect with voters and if he was prepared to spend big on TV ads, Trump brushed the questions aside. He allegedly asserted, "I'm going to get in and all the polls are going to go crazy. I'm going to suck all the oxygen out of the room. I know how to work the media in a way that they will never take the lights off of me."
What is being extrapolated from the anecdotes in the Politico story is a theory that Trump was almost Machiavellian in his plotting. Among other things, he declared his candidacy for the Republican nomination early, in June of 2015, a time when there's a news void and he'd get free attention. And, of course, he never needed to spend much money on TV ads – an enormous financial burden for any other candidate – because he got free publicity the more outrageous and bombastic he was.
Thing is, there's nothing Machiavellian about the game plan. Manipulating TV news coverage is a decades-old ploy. I've written several times about the Mike Harris campaign that swept Ontario in 1995, a singularly successful campaign built around the relentless provision of TV photo ops that, at the time, also produced an awful lot of sneering from the other parties.
But, as the Ontario Liberals and NDP found to their cost, Harris and his handlers displayed a stunning grasp of the simple-minded recipes for TV news reporting. The currency of TV news is this: simple, memorable images. What Trump did, perhaps, was use bluster and insult instead of carefully crafted photo-ops.
The important twist in both theories – which are complementary, really – is that the appeal of Trump's message has to find resonance and support among voters. He was a crucible for disgruntlement, no matter how the message was distributed. And me, I'm thinking that it is early days in the ongoing analysis of how and why Trump won.
While the hand-wringing continues, the phrase "Nobody knows anything" remains apt.