When Celebrity and Political Journalism Collide: Reporting Standards, Entertainment, and the Conundrum of Covering Donald Trump’s 2016 Campaign Amber E. Boydstun and Regina G. Lawrence While the rise of celebrities-turned-politicians has been well documented and theorized, how their bids for office are treated by the establishment press has been less closely examined. Research on celebrity politics on the one hand, and on journalism standards on the other, have rarely been brought into conversation with one another. Here, we draw from both literatures to explore how the press covered Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Prior research on political journalism would likely have predicted that Trump, with his lack of conventional political experience and a career in reality TV, would have been treated to derisive, dismissive press coverage, which we refer to as “clown” coverage. But Trump’s fame and wealth, and the high entertainment value of his campaign, would also lead the media to cover him heavily. We argue that the collision of entertainment- infused politics with traditional journalism practices created a profound dilemma for the press’s ability to cover the campaign coherently, and that the press responded to this dilemma by giving Trump as much clown-like coverage as serious coverage, throughout not just the primary but also the general election. We support our argument through qualitative evidence from interviews with journalists and other political insiders, and quantitative evidence from a content analysis of New York Times and Washington Post coverage of Trump at key points throughout the campaign. O n June 16, 2015, Donald J. Trump descended via escalator to the ground level of Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for President, claim- ing as a main qualification that “I’m using my own money ...I’m really rich.” Across news outlets, media coverage of the announcement was remarkably consistent in describ- ing Trump in terms of his celebrity status. The Washington Post cast Trump as a “real estate mogul and reality *Data replication sets are available in Harvard Dataverse at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/3SFGTQ Amber E. Boydstun is Associate Professor of Political Science, Affiliated Faculty of Communication, and Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California, Davis (aboydstun@ucdavis.edu). Her research uses lab experiments, large-scale media studies, and manual and computational text analysis to examine the interaction between media and politics. She is author of Making the News: Politics, the Media, and Agenda Setting, winner of the 2018 Doris A. Graber Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association, and co-author of The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence, winner of the 2008 Gladys M. Kammerer Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association. Regina G. Lawrence is Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication and Executive Director of the Agora Journalism Center at the University of Oregon (rgl@uoregon.edu). Her research focuses on the role of the media in public discourse, politics and policy, and civic engagement. Her books include When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina, winner of the 2016 Doris A. Graber Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association, and Hillary Clinton’s Race for the White House: Gender Politics and the Media on the Campaign Trail. We are grateful to Peter Van Aelst for allowing us to use here some of the interview data collected for Boydstun and Van Aelst (2018); to Rasmus Nielsen, Talia Stroud, and Danna Young for helpful feedback; to Summer Mielke and Young Eun Moon for excellent research assistance; and to Noreen Brar, Jason Cummings, Shayla Griffin, Kaleigh Homstad, Marc Kildare, Brandon Miller, Claire Rapp, Griffin Sproul, and Sabrina Younes for meticulous content analysis. doi:10.1017/S153759271900238X © American Political Science Association 2019 1 Special Issue Article https://doi.org/10.1017/S153759271900238X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. UC Davis, on 18 Sep 2019 at 16:45:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.