You can start a state television network, but you can’t make people watch.
President Donald Trump’s White House this week launched Trump TV, a 24/7 YouTube livestream of new and recycled Trump speeches and other administration events—but initial viewership has been low, and the content isn’t very compelling. Its slow start shows in real time how hard it really is to establish state media, even for a former reality TV producer like Trump.
The Trump administration debuted Trump TV on Monday as a supposed replacement for news outlets CNN, MS NOW, and Politico, which Trump banned from the White House the previous Friday. Its logo, an all-caps wordmark in a forward-leaning sans-serif font, recalls a similarly styled logo for Trump’s short-lived airline. Its sizzle reel, meanwhile, treats private IP as property of the state by running unauthorized clips from shows like Seinfeld, SpongeBob SquarePants, Family Guy, and The Simpsons while the text “TRUMPTV” flashes and repeats on the screen.
Big news, low ratings
While the White House X account hyped the channel as “the latest and greatest from the administration all in one place,” the experience of watching it so far has been more like putting videos from Trump’s C-SPAN profile page on shuffle, but with less context.
Videos are shown without any information about when or where they were filmed or what it is you’re actually watching. And unlike an independent, fully operating media outlet, it also doesn’t cut in with live events. When Trump spoke at the United Nations General Assembly on Monday, the livestream instead aired Trump’s remarks at the 74th National Prayer Breakfast back in February. When he held a bilateral meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday, the channel was instead streaming his bilateral meeting with U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham, which occurred earlier in the day.
“America doesn’t have a state media system, and a YouTube channel by Trump is not the same thing as state media,” Sarah Ann Oates, a professor at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism and an expert on media, authoritarianism, Russian propaganda, and disinformation, tells Fast Company.
Most countries invest heavily in a professional broadcaster that’s financed by the state, she says, and that creates problems if there’s a political takeover of state media, which often happens. Still, it can’t just be created overnight.
“State broadcasters take an enormous amount of money and effort and a lot of time in order to develop a relationship with an audience and grow an audience,” Oates says. “He’s not doing that here. I don’t think even a fervent Trump supporter would confuse Trump TV with news. They might like watching it, but I think they know not to expect any actual news there.”
During its first 24 hours, Trump TV averaged over 1,000 concurrent viewers, a figure that dropped below 1,000 on day two. The feed is titled “TRUMP TV: The Essentials Station” on YouTube. “Trump TV” is also available via the White House website, as part of a split-screen player that also has space for live coverage, along with a scrolling news ticker at the bottom.
Trump TV history
The idea of Trump TV is at least a decade old. Back during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, he was reportedly considering launching a video-based media company after the election. In the campaign’s closing weeks, his team ran a nightly livestreamed show on his Facebook page, complete with interviews with campaign advisers and conservative commentators.
The concept 10 years ago was to potentially turn it into a cable TV channel down the road. The concept for Trump TV today is to push the administration’s agenda and narrative while icing out the independent press.
Trump has a well-established track record of habitually lying about important political matters, and as such, “we can safely assume that this new Trump TV channel will serve mostly propagandistic purposes by promoting falsehoods and generally trying to glorify Trump and his agenda,” says Victor Pickard, a professor of media policy and politics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication.
Even though the channel’s reach seems to be relatively small, “we can probably assume that a well-oiled right-wing media ecosystem will help to further amplify his messaging far beyond the original product,” he adds. “This is all part of Trump‘s broader media strategy to flood the zone with his preferred narratives and talking points while trying to undercut the news media’s capacity for dissenting views or any kind of journalism that might stray from his version of events.”
Trump’s approval rating has fallen to a record low of 32% over factors like his handling of inflation, immigration, and the Iran war, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released this week, so it’s not surprising he doesn’t like the news these days. But creating his own alternative isn’t as easy as he might assume.