Made-for-TV national conventions are finally getting an internet makeover
This summer’s conventions could learn a thing or two from Peloton and the 2020 NFL draft, some TV professionals say. Also in this week’s issue:
How Trump’s tough-on-crime rhetoric brands him as out of date
Whoever Photoshopped these images for Fox News missed a spot
Bubba Wallace’s NASCAR BLM paint job is everything I needed
Yours,
Made-for-TV national conventions are finally getting an internet makeover
Credit: Nichole Shinn for Bloomberg Businessweek
National conventions are the height of televised political theater, but this year they could look a little different. Here are three reasons why 2020 will be the year that the Democratic and Republican national conventions will be more online than ever:
Convention viewership is down. Back in 2008, Barack Obama and John McCain both had more than 38 million people tune into their acceptance speeches. Compare that with the 32.2 million who watched Donald Trump and the 29.8 million who watched Hillary Clinton four years ago. Although millions will still tune in live to hear Trump and Joe Biden in August, consumer habits have changed and many will see convention highlights on social media instead.
Fewer people have cable or satellite television. In 2016, 75% of U.S. homes had a paid-TV service, and as of May 2020, that dropped to 63%. The cord cutting is only accelerating due to a combination of record unemployment and the lack of live sports, which contributed to the largest drop in paid-TV subscribers on record during the first quarter of this year.
Parties are rewriting their convention playbooks for the pandemic. For Democrats, Biden suggested in April that they might have to do a virtual convention. A party panel approved a measure last month that would allow remote delegate voting, and the party intends to follow local safety guidelines, so traditional big crowds are out. For Republicans, they’ll be splitting their time between two cities after North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) refused to budge on requiring social distancing measures and masks. The Republican National Committee announced Thursday that Trump’s acceptance speech will happen in Jacksonville, Fla., however they’ll keep party business in Charlotte, N.C. Organizers in both parties will be dealing with new logistical challenges.
TV professionals were asked by Bloomberg Businessweek how a virtual convention might be produced. Mediaite founder Dan Abrams suggested the political equivalent of a Peloton class, with applause instead of music, scrolling reaction tweets instead of a leaderboard, and a candidate instead of an instructor. Former Lifetime executive Tim Brooks said organizers could look to the videoconferenced 2020 NFL draft, which featured a TV screen of people cheering behind commissioner Roger Goodell.
“On some level this is just pushing things toward a logical conclusion,” TV producer Michael Hirschorn told Businessweek. “And I think that there are going to be new and interesting aesthetics that emerge out of this moment.”
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How Trump’s tough-on-crime rhetoric brands him as out of date
Credit: C-SPAN
Trump has taken a vocal, hardline approach against crime since nationwide protests against police brutality and racial injustice began. He’s used the phrase “LAW & ORDER” in comments, tweets, and self-retweets more than a dozen times since last Tuesday, and despite the fact that recent protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful, Trump is still condemning rioters and looters.
This threatens to undermine Trump’s attempt to run to the left of Biden on criminal justice. Trump’s campaign has touted his work on criminal justice reform and attacked Biden’s involvement on a 1994 crime bill, but Trump’s tough-on-crime language is more Richard Nixon than Kim Kardashian West. Republican pollster Frank Luntz thinks Trump’s rhetoric is dated and doesn’t help him.
“He’s isolated linguistically,” Luntz told the Washington Post. “He’s talking about ‘law and order.’ The last time I heard that was the 1968 campaign. His rhetoric is 50 years old. The world has changed.”
Luntz said Trump’s language is “not a lexicon that gets you elected. This is a lexicon that gets you to 45 percent and not more.”
Trump signed an executive order on policing Tuesday that included the creation of a national database for excessive force complaints but the order did not satisfy wider demands for reform made by activists.
Whoever Photoshopped these images for Fox News missed a spot
Two altered images Fox News ran on its site without indicating they had been altered.
Fox News used manipulated and misleading photos last week in stories about the Seattle neighborhood now known as the “Capitol Hill Occupied Protest,” or “CHOP,” and whoever Photoshopped them missed a spot.
The Fox News website ran images that used a photo of a man in a green facemask with a firearm who was providing volunteer security in the neighborhood on June 10 and mashed it up with two other photos. One of the photos was from the same day and showed an entrance sign to the neighborhood (top) and the other photo was from May 30 of a smashed Urban Outfitters window (bottom). One way you can tell they were Photoshopped is the little bit of red between the man’s elbow and torso that came from a red car he stood in front of in the original photograph.
Fox News also used a photo of a fire in Minnesota for a story about Seattle with the headline: “Crazy Town: Seattle helpless as armed guards patrol anarchists’ ‘autonomous zone,’ shake down businesses: cops.” Yikes.
The network did not indicate in its captions that the altered images were photo illustrations. In a statement to the Seattle Times, Fox News said it had replaced one of the spliced images with “clearly delineated images of a gunman and a shattered storefront.”
André 3000 made these protest shirts for charity
André 3000 announced a limited-run t-shirt line last week to raise money for the Movement for Black Lives. The shirts were inspired by the jumpsuits he wore on OutKast’s 2014 tour, with phrases like “across cultures, darker people suffer most. why?”
The shirts were up for three days and are no longer available. On Instagram, 3000 wrote, “Something very important is happening all over the world and it is happening to all of us.”
Bubba Wallace’s BLM NASCAR paint job is everything I needed
Credit: @NASCAR/Twitter
NASCAR announced it would ban the display of confederate flags at its events and properties last Wednesday, and later that day, Darrell “Bubba” Wallace — the racing series’ only black driver and the driver who called for the ban — showed up at Martinsville Speedway in Virginia with a Black Lives Matter paint job on his No. 43 Chevrolet.
Wallace said the design was inspired by the Blackout Tuesday campaign on Instagram. The clasped hands on the hood were hand drawn by Bradley Sisson, the graphic designer at Richard Petty Motorsports. Wallace wore a black “I Can’t Breathe” shirt and an American flag face mask.
Here’s what support for Black Lives Matter looks like on Twitter
Credit: Pew Research Center
The shift in attitudes on race in the U.S. right now is historic, and you can tell on Twitter. Data analyzed by Pew found the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag was used about 47.8 million times on the site from May 26 to June 7, shattering all previous usage records. That’s nearly 3.7 million times per day.
Credit: Emojipedia
Emojipedia analyzed tweets that used the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag between June 4 and 5 and found nearly 12% of tweets used emoji. The top emoji by far was the raised fist emoji.
The future of politics is unpolished and direct-to-camera
A pair of YouTube preroll ads from the Biden and Trump campaigns showed two different approaches to online list building. One felt like the future and the other felt like the past. Yello membership subscribers can read my story here.