One of the greatest indignations I've had as political media trade
reporter covering Trump has been the way he appropriated -- and twisted -- some of the greatest American campaign themes ever conceived: Ronald Reagan's. And I have a feeling many of you think so too.
Which would help explain why my Oct. 24 post("It's Moron Again In America") about Trump calling off trade talks with our largest trading
partner -- you know, the one to the north that is NOT our 51st state -- all because the province of Ontario ran a commercial using archival Reagan footage to make a point about Trump's erratic tariffs
policy. (As you might imagine, Reagan was not a fan of tariffs.)
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The second most-read blog post was my Jan. 21 column ("Democracy Dies In Overplaying News Safety") based on Stagwell research released at
Davos, which showed three-quarters of marketers feel they should spend more -- not less -- advertising on news programming. The piece also presaged Omnicom's and Interpublic''s capitulation to refrain
from using its own bias to determine where its clients spend their ad dollars.
No. 3 was my Jan. 20 post ("Hybrid Warfare: A Post-Buy Analysis") about a Stagwell analysis of the rapidly
accelerating use of "hybrid" political ads combining issues advertising with a candidate's. The practice, according to Assembly Director of Political Strategy Tyler Goldberg is an ingenious
loophole enabling issue ads to qualify for a candidate's Federal Election Commission-regulated lowest ad unit rates, making their campaign dollars stretch farther, but also depriving media outlets of
premium rates and devouring access to inventory that might otherwise have gone to general brand advertisers.
It's also a new way of exploiting "Dark Money" to generate more reach, part of a
practice I label as "Dark Media."
But if you ask me, the most ingenious use of media during the early days of the new Trump administration was my Jan. 24 column ("Make America Wayback Again") about the creative editorial team at TheSkimm who figured out how to
scrape the entire federal website about reproductive rights after Trump shut it down. By using Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, the team recreated reproductiverights.gov under a new domain, ReproductiveRightsDotGov.com.
I'm not sure if anyone else has followed the model, but if you know of any, let me know and I'll
do a column about them too.
Rounding out the five most-read posts of the year was my Sept. 17 post ("Then They Came For The Late Night Hosts And I Did Not Speak Out...") paying
homage to German pastor Martin Niemöller's Nazi-era poem, "First They Came," in the wake of FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's
pressure campaign to get Jimmy Kimmel suspended, as well as the administration's presumed role in Paramount's firing of Stephen Colbert.