His base isn't the majority of the population but obviously you don't need the majority to win an election. Look at how quickly the Trumpettes in the WR dismiss any link from CNN right off the bat. Enough of those people in the right places and you can take an election.
How big of a pool of voters are we talking about, though? A dozen guys on an internet forum?
The way I see it, people are taking their experience of a fringe, and attributing a much greater level of influence to that fringe, than is actually occurring in reality, because of the disproportionate amount of time that they themselves are spending amongst that fringe group.
The truth is that if you interviewed random people about whether they believe Hillary to be a
phile who sacrifices to Satan, or whether they believe that Trump is a white nationalist, a Russian agent and a possible rapist, you'd probably find that the latter is a much more credible, mainstream belief amongst people, than the former.
But sure the MSM still have more moral authority than random CT channels. But those channels don't need to individually have more authority, they just need to undermine the MSM just enough. After that you get a Balkanization of media consumption where everyone creates their own media bubbles. That was facilitated by social media. So even if the MSM sources individually have more authority than individual content creators like Jones or Dice, in general people will trust what their bubbles feed them whether that's from Dice or Shapiro or what have you. There's countless flavors of "independent" media and not only do you have your pick of them but they come to you through the algorithms that govern social media sites like Facebook and YT.
If MSM is undermined by an Alex Jones or a Mark Dice to a significant degree, then they must not be doing a very good job.
I would argue that MSM has discredited itself in many regards, which is indicated by your next statement.
And like I said that negative media coverage for Trump backfired IMO. I think it was the CEO of MSNBC who said that Trump may be bad for America but he's good for the network. Trump's ability to bring in ratings granted him special privileges. He was getting phone interviews on air and his podium was getting more air time than some of the other candidates.
This is true, and this is why I don't think that such "smear campaigns" necessarily win or lose an election. All publicity can be good publicity, depending on how you make use of it, and Trump was an expert in making use of it. In fact, an old trick in politics was to spread untruthful rumours about yourself, to put further doubt into claims that may have actually been truthful and legitimately damaging. De-sensitizing people to the rumor-mill, can actually have a positive effect on a politician's career, granting them a layer of "immunity" to scandals that few others possess.
I would not say that the negative coverage back-fired though, but rather, it accomplished exactly what it intended to do, which was to put more money in the media's pockets. Making Trump win or lose an election wasn't a concern, the only concern was to have Trump in the head-lines every single day until people grew sick of it.
Anyone who felt like the mainstream media was an "ally" of theirs in having done so, must've a gullible jack-ass of epic proportions.
