Donald Trump and NBC are Both Wrong

Although NBC Universal officially severed ties with Donald Trump last summer over his comments calling Mexicans rapists, he will continue to personally gain financially from one of the shows he created for the network, Celebrity Apprentice. Earlier this week, Variety reported that the reality star would retain his executive producer credit (along with royalties) for the reboot scheduled to return January 2 with new host Arnold Schwarzenegger.

While NBC won’t be paying Trump directly, his continued involvement with the program raises serious concerns about the ability of the network to remain impartial when reporting on his presidency. At the same time, it also creates a potentially tempting means for skirting federal corruption statutes.

This is largely due to an innovation that Trump’s co-creator of the program, Mark Burnett, introduced into the reality-TV genre: lucrative product-placement deals. How this works is that each episode revolves around the contestants working for a “client.” The clients in turn pay handsomely for this exposure. Thus, despite a severe decline in ratings from its first season (and an even larger decline from the Top-10 heyday that the original, ambitious-nobodies Apprentice first enjoyed when it premiered in 2004), the show continues to be quite profitable.

In 2011, Ad Age reported that companies were coughing up between $5 and $9 million dollars per episode for the opportunity to have one of their brands featured in a given week’s competition, with Trump personally pocketing a $1.5 million cut of those fees each time. That same year, Ad Age declared Celebrity Apprentice as the prime-time show with the most product placement. An article in the Journal of Management and Marketing Research shows how effective this approach is for advertisers. In it, the researchers discuss the specific case of Dairy Queen’s Blizzard product. During its featured week on The Apprentice, sales increased by 30%.

But if using Trump’s platform to promote their products was good business in the past, corporations have even more of an incentive to take part now. As Dylan Byers at CNN Money pointed out, if Trump’s prior contractual arrangements remain in effect, then “the show’s product integration deals…[are] now a potential avenue of influence for companies that want to get the ear of Trump and his administration.” NBC’s website for the new season touts its focus on “technology and innovation.” How, if at all, this ultimately may intersect with Trump’s much-ballyhooed tech summit yesterday remains to be seen.

With so much money at stake, NBC’s willingness or ability to be objective in its news coverage about the new president or his administration while simultaneously hosting the show that made him a household name should be questioned. Evidence from Trump’s 11-year run as Apprentice host would suggest it can’t.

According to a report by the highly conservative Media Research Center, of the 335 news stories the network ran on the businessman during the period of 2004-15, only 15 were negative. Of these stories critical of his business failures, the network only disclosed its financial ties to Trump in two of them. When you also consider that NBC Universal donated more than $500,000 to the Trump Foundation between 2007 and 2012, it would appear that the network may have some self-reflection to do.

This should be troubling to any citizen concerned about a free press and the monopolization of government by corporate interests. If NBC wants to retain any integrity as an objective news source and avoid becoming a vector for executive corruption, it needs to tell Donald Trump that he’s fired. For real this time.