The Media v. Trump

The media has been blamed, fairly or not, for facilitating Donald Trump’s rise by providing so much free and unduly uncritical publicity during the primary season. He didn’t need to raise money or buy ads, the analysis goes, because he was constantly in the news. I’m not sure this was really the media’s “fault,” because Trump, by virtue of who he was and what he said, was so much more newsworthy than the other canned candidates – Jeb Bush, anyone?. The press was as much responding to the public’s curiosity as setting the agenda itself.
Whatever the case, the media has apparently taken this criticism to heart and is jumping on every chance to challenge and condemn the Republican nominee. I see this most directly, of course, in the paper I read daily, the New York Times. Sunday, for instance, a three-column upper right front page headline – the most important story of the day – trumpeted a feature story, “How Trump Profited on Failed Casinos,” with the subhead, “Investors and Builders Were Left on the Hook as He Made Millions.” The lawsuit involving Trump University is similarly getting cure-of-cancer play. The Times is as good as saying, this guy is a bum. The New Yorker is equally disrespectful of Trump. In yesterday’s blog, editor David Remnick, no less, castigated the “velocity, vapidity and sheer ugliness” of Trump’s comments after the Orlando massacre.
The trouble is, I don’t think anyone reading the Times or the New Yorker was going to vote for Trump to begin with, and the media that the Trump followers get their information from won’t attack him for fear of losing their audience. It must be frustrating for the Times journalists to expend so much energy “exposing” Trump’s bad practices and bad behavior and realize that it probably makes no difference. How different this is from prior campaigns where the discovery of a single peccadillo, a “gotcha,” could swing the polls almost overnight.