Task 1: Social Action

Whoever Controls the Media, Controls the Mind

Purpose:

The purpose of a social action campaign is to bring about public attention to a particular subject or person. An example of this would be the Trump/Hillary presidency campaign, which was massive even outside of the USA due to how intensive and important it was. They can also be used to bring about local or global change, especially in the case of voting during specific polls, as is the case with the Trump/Hillary campaign. This was used to change America as a local place, but had massively impactful meanings for the rest of the world as well. The can also be used to raise awareness in the general public to a particular subject. This was the main point in the presidency campaign as it was used by both sides to raise the polls for each side. They can even be used to change the public’s attitude towards a specific subject or person. The same way that Trump made Hillary look bad because of the FBI e-mail scandal.

Impact:

The impact a social action campaign has depends on a number of things, namely how much money is spent on it. This will bring attention from the public far more than any other point, due to how the public see wealth. They can also be impactful in the sense that they just work, as was the case with Trump’s half of the presidency campaign, as it got him elected as the new American president. A social media campaign can be quite a powerful thing, in that it can be used to almost control the media in general. When Trump was trying to become president, he would openly lie about different things to help his case as much as possible, while still managing to stay on the positive side of Americas media. Most of America saw him as a national hero in the wake of Hillary e-mail case, and this may be one of many things that pushed him to the top.

Trump’s Campaign:

The first campaign I will look at is the American 2016 presidency campaigns of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. This began near the end of Barrack Obamas presidency, when America was looking for a new president. It formally began in June of 2016, at Trumps own personal office block, Trump Tower. Trump began as the republican candidate for America and chose mike pence as his vice president running mate during the whole campaign. One of the main differences between Trump and Hillary was that Hillary decided to run for president in early 2007, when Barrack Obama was also running as the first black president. After losing to Obama, Hillary decided to continue to run and would go against Trump in 2016. This only strengthened her party and Hillary's personal standing in the Americas as it showed that she was strong enough to bounce back from losing once and go at it again. Trump almost came out of nowhere when he decided to run for presidency, making his victory even stranger. This may most likely have been due to the way the campaign was run from both sides, as this is one of the most important things about social action, how you socially act. Hillary decided to aim her presidency at the younger people in America, within the age range of 18-44, while Trump wanted the older people, of 45-65+. This may have been what decided the vote, but there where many other things involved in the final verdict, namely how each candidate aimed themselves at their target audience. The most glaringly obvious reason Trump winning was the fact that Trump actually got less votes than Hillary. Due to the way America does its presidential voting, Trump won by having control of certain states, rather than having more votes.

Donald Trump has always been a republican, and showed this heavily in his race to become American president, promising all kinds of ridiculous things, like a border wall along the Mexico - United States border. This wall was supposed to cost around 8 to 12 billion dollars, but some experts say it would cost up to 25 billion dollars, all of which Donald promised the world Mexico would pay for. The Mexican president. Enrique Pena, has said numerous times that Mexico will not pay for the wall. This was one of Trumps biggest selling points, and one of the main reasons he was elected at all. His promise to keep illegal, and some legal, Mexican immigrants out of America with this famous wall is what gave him such power in the southern states of America, places like Alabama, Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. These states already have quite a reputation for being heavily weighted against immigration and being biased against people from other parts of the world, specifically Mexico. This is because Mexicans who break in to America will likely end up in these states as they are right on the border, making these states harbour a grudge against them. Trump decided to play on this ideology of being against Mexicans to fuel the building of a wall between countries, making Trumps wall one of the most powerful media campaigns ever. Trump also used his idea of being unstoppable to fuel his opposition and therefor fuel his own party even more. His slogan ‘Can’t Stump The Trump’ was used to push his agenda of being unstoppable. Over the course of his campaign, Trump would use many slogans to his advantage. One of the biggest slogans used by Trump was ‘Make America Great Again’, or MAGA for short. This was originally used by Reagan to show that America was suffering from a worsening economy over the years, and has been used by numerous different political figures, until Donald Trump trademarked it in 2015. Some argue that it is such a powerful quote it singlehandedly won Trump the race, but others say it is a racially oriented slogan. In just the first half of 2017, Trump used the slogan 33 times on Twitter. It has been seen as being as powerful as it is because it wasn’t just a slogan used to push Trump, but rather as a movement of people to strive towards a better future for themselves and their families.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-21/-make-america-great-again-is-Trump-s-magic-twitter-mantra
An article on Bloomberg states that using the quote added around 51,000 re-tweets to a post, adding around 50% more re-tweets to each post featuring it. The phrase has been used many times to strengthen Trumps hold on American politics, since Hillary’s slogan of ‘I’m With Her’, was merely used to indicate she would become the first female president of America, and was used as a point about feminism in the world of politics. Trump also had the slogan ‘Drain The Swamp’, a reference to the historical attempts to drain swamps in America to cut the population of mosquitoes and combat malaria. This has led to the term being used as a metaphor for different things, and Trump used it to show his plan to fix the problem in federal governments, draining the ‘swamp’ of the government of the ‘mosquitoes’ who are infecting it. The biggest change Trump’s slogans had was obviously making people vote for him, obviously, but they have also had a massive public impact in media, namely MAGA. It garnered massive media attention, specifically comedies. Many different forms of media have taken to parodying the term, not the biggest of which was John Oliver on his talk show Last Week Tonight, when he spoofed the slogan and urged his viewers to ‘Make Donald Drumpf Again’, in reference to Donald’s ancestor’s original name. This segment broke HBO viewership records with 85 million views.
http://donaldjdrumpf.com/
This was obviously a parody of Trump’s quote, but only helped to push the original quote even harder. Any publicity is good publicity for Trump, only helping to keep him in the media longer, even without his presence, showing that Trump doesn’t even need to be present to make an impact. We can’t talk about Trump without talking about his infamous twitter account in more detail. One of the most glaring points about it is that Trump has almost double the followers that Hillary has, and almost 4 times that of Bernie Sanders. This will have been one of the main reasons that Trump won the race, his use of twitter. Hillary was targeting a younger audience when running, but Trump aimed at older people, while also hitting the youths through social media. He is, after all, a businessman, so it makes sense he would be good at hitting 2 or more audiences at once.

Hillary’s Campaign:

We can’t talk about presidential campaigns without talking about Hillary Clinton, since she went against Trump directly. Hillary was a far less surprising candidate for president than Trump, as she had already run once before. While running, there were many different ways she tried to target her many audiences, not the least of which was the younger people in America, and her impact on media and the American public will be remembered forever. When she first announced that she was running for president against Trump, in April 2015, she said she would become the people’s champion. Her main points where, of course, that she was a woman, and this was one of the main reasons she gained such popularity with women in America. Another of the many reasons she gain popularity was because she decided to focus on more local issues, such as, while in Mississippi she announced that she was worried about the lead levels in the water in Jackson, the capital, where it is a hot issue. She did this for most every state she visited, proving she was a people’s champion, instead of focusing on large extended points like Trump and his wall.  She used these issues to help push her agenda in these states in such a way that they would look good to younger people there, similar to how she tried to aim her entire campaign at the younger people. One of the main ways that Hillary hit hard with a younger audience was, strangely, being a bit of a weirdo, in the sense that she tried to hit the youths with as much of the hip modern things their into as she could to try and attract their attention. She tried to hop on the gravy train of memes on the internet to attract that kind of college youth. She also tried to make jokes during press meetings, such as when she mocked Trumps use of the fake word ‘covfefe’ in his twitter post about press coverage.
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/05/31/politics/Hillary-clinton-covfefe/index.html
She jokes that it may have been a secret message from the Russians, which was a constant point of contention between Trump and Hillary. Hillary accused Trump of being in cahoots with the Russians and said they were funding him and his campaign, creating diversions to detract from Hillary’s campaign. She went and dabbed on the Ellen Show to show she was ‘down’ with all the cool kids, which made headlines at the fact that the potential future president of the USA was doing what amounted to a silly dance move just because everyone else was doing it, throwing her entire campaign into question. Would she just change her mind about a subject if the young people asked her to? After a few weeks of trying to lure in a younger crowd to vote for her, SUPER DELUXE, a YouTube meme channel, made a video mocking her and the way she was trying too hard to get the youths attention.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoXDe8HxHBA
on top of all of this there was the fact that she was being investigated by the FBI about deleted e-mails, a topic for another discussion, but fair to say it had none but ill effects for her campaign. Donald Trump constantly made reference to this with his slogan ‘Lock Her Up’, implying that Hillary should be locked up in prison for what she has done, while himself also being under fire from Hillary for supposedly being in with the Russians. This constant back and forth between both candidates is what made the election so entertaining in a general sense, that there was always something new going on on TV about them, something else for the media corporations to sink their teeth into. Another point Hillary kept going back to to try and strengthen her campaign was the fact that she was the only of the 2 candidates that has any actual experience in this kind of politics. Trump was coming straight from a world of business, while Hillary ad been the secretary of defence for years, and had already run for president before then. This would clearly help her attract an older audience to her side in that she has been around for longer than Trump and so would know a thing or 2 more than him. She also expressed a clear need for steady and experienced leadership, again going back to her experience in the field, and the fact that she believes that her leadership will be stronger and more stable than Trumps, so people should vote for her instead. She this will have had the impact on the public that they will have thought she was a more stable and sane person in comparison to Trump, as he has been deemed a madman or crazy over the duration of the campaign. The main impact that the Hillary campaign had was that it showed you can both aim your campaign at an older audience and a younger at the same time, as both candidates did, but with varying degrees of success. Hillary also had the most in terms of fundraising, as Trump decided against any kind of outsourcing for his campaign, deciding instead to fund it himself. This opened the door to allow Hillary to take complete control of this side of the debate, showing she was all for other businesses helping her out if she needed it, showing she was a human. This will have helped her out and shown that she is still just a human who may need help sometimes.

Comparison:

http://edition.cnn.com/election/results/president

Comparing both of these campaigns isn’t the hardest thing in the world since they both ran against each other, but they used so vastly different methods of campaigning that it’s like they were going for two separate things entirely. The first thing to look at is what the actual results of their respective campaigns where, and the obvious answer is Trump won, Hillary lost. But it goes deeper than that, Trump didn’t just win, he won in the face of slander and being called a racist bigot who had no idea what he was doing. Hillary lost despite having far more experience and reason to win. It would have made sense if Hillary had won, it made no sense for Trump to win like he did, hence Ladbrokes putting 150/1 against Trump winning. Hillary chose to target a younger more youthful audience and focused mainly on local and state-wide issues instead of looking at massive USA-wide things like Trump. She showed that she was more willing to take help from outside sources whereas Trump wanted to fund his whole campaign himself, showing his independence and wealth. Looking at both of these campaigns separately it is clear to see why Trump won like he did. He was huge down south in places like Texas and Alabama, places known for being racist and against immigration, so it is obvious he would win here with his border wall, while Hillary would struggle. The whole presidential campaign had a massive impact on the rest of the world too, with BBC news having constant coverage of the race going on at once, showing an impartial, unbiased view of the race. One massive change already being seen in America in the wake of Trumps victory is that he has signed off on the walls construction. This is a huge thing because the whole world thought that it was just bull Trump would spout at rallies to get more attention, but he actually went and did it, or will have once it’s done. The whole situation has obviously worked to strengthen certain states that are more republican and helped to squash any conservative states into submission. All in all, I think the whole race can be seen as 2 completely different social action campaigns, because they both wanted the same thing, but went at it in such vastly different ways.