Trump and the Media

Biased. Dishonest. Mean. Unfair. Disgusting.  Not nice.

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Those are the common terms Donald Trump uses to describe "the media" which, coming from a media creation, seems sort of odd, doesn't it? I mean, his campaign is entirely a media creation, right?

Imagine if his birtherism had been ignored back in the day.

Or imagine if he had been covered the same as other unlikely candidates are covered.

Take Tom Hoefling, the America's Party nominee, or Prohibition Party nominee Jim Hedges.  These fringers have had zero coverage; if Trump's campaign had received the same attention,  we'd most likely contemplating a race between unenergetic Jeb! Bush or Lying' Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton.

(And conversely, imagine of those two parties, or any of the others that are fielding candidates, had received the kind of coverage Trump has gotten? We'd be staring democracy in the face, right?)

But because Donald Trump is, well, Donald Trump, there was no way the media could resist his campaign, any more than the Republican party could resist it. Without him, there would have been significantly less attention paid to the Republicans; we would have been bored to tears with their circular firing squad and their 'kid's table' debates and all the rest.

Of course, Trump is helped by the 'biased' media, whom he loved when they were stroking his ego and feeding his madness during the primaries, accepting his calls at all hours, interrupting other coverage to hear what he has to say.  On the other hand, you recall he's banned several news organizations from his rallies, because they were 'mean to him' or dishonest, to Trump's way of thinking - but even then, he gets the coverage he covets.

Here's the latest from His Hairness, speaking at a rally in Connecticut on his media coverage, which, as of May, had been measured at $3 billion in 'free' advertising:

I'm not running against Crooked Hillary, I'm running against the crooked media. That's what I'm running against. I'm not running against Crooked Hillary.  

I'll tell you in particular lately we have a newspaper that's failing badly, it's losing a lot of money, it's going to be out of business very soon: the New York Times. Maybe what we'll do, we'll start taking their press credentials away from them.  

He's also continued his assault on CNN, which his supporters refer to as the Clinton News Network:

CNN is so disgusting And by the way their rating are going down big league, you know why? Because I refuse to be interviewed. And I get high ratings, what can I say. 

These people are so dishonest.  

Ah, yes. So dishonest, those dastardly people at CNN. They're so dishonest they've started fact-checking Trump in the screen crawl. Here's just one example; there are more.

But here's the thing: CNN's ratings are suffering. Trump's supporters are boycotting, they say, (although they seem to know an awful lot about what gets said on the network) and they make no bones about it. Take a look at a sampling of the comments on the ratings article, and you'll see what I mean.

Trump's love/hate relationship with the media is a very carefully planned and meticulously coordinated thing, it's not an accident.  Anyone who thinks otherwise is mistaken, especially now that Trump has basically admitted it.

During his CNBC interview with host Hugh Hewitt, a Trump supporter mind you, he argued repeatedly about his statement that Barack Obama is "the founder of ISIS." No matter how hard Hewitt tried to temper the comment, or explain it in some way that would soften the blow and the reaction to it, Trump wasn't having it.

When Hewitt finally gave up and said he would have used different language, here was Trump's response:

But they wouldn't talk about your language, and they do talk about my language, right?

Finally, some honesty from the Trump camp.