Donald Trump Won’t Leave Us Alone

[applegrove]

Donald Trump Won’t Leave Us Alone

by Frank Bruni at the NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/opinion/campaign-stops/donald-trump-wont-leave-us-alone.html?_r=0

"SNIP..............


Should producers and editors have ignored metrics in favor of their own judgment and sense of mission? They routinely do this — otherwise, there’d be wall-to-wall pet stories — but to play down Trump specifically once he’d emerged as the front-runner would have been elitist and paternalistic: exactly those qualities that the news media has been derided for.

It’s because journalists remained Trump-rapt and Trump-inquisitive that he said what he did about abortion and so many voters heard it in full. Same goes for Trump’s troubling takes on violence at his rallies, nuclear weapons in Asia, the future of NATO and so much more.

There are legitimate questions of proportion in regard to Trump coverage, and perhaps he has been accorded additional acres of news media real estate because he’s so easy to talk and write about, a policy-free zone of quickly digested, succinctly rendered struts and slurs.

But Americans took up residence on that terrain, and frolicked there, and if we want the end of Trump, we have to set up camp elsewhere. He’ll resist it. He’s addicted to us. Soon enough, we’ll have to confront and deal with our addiction to him.



...............SNIP"

[pampango]

1. "From my seat, most of the Trump coverage was negative: the Mexican “rapists,” the Muslim ban, the

blood coming out of Megyn Kelly’s “wherever,” the mocking of John McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, the boasts about his penis, the shrugging about the Ku Klux Klan. These tempests could — and should — have done as much to quash Trump as to elevate him, unless coverage itself equals votes, in which case there’s more cause for more teeth-gnashing about American democracy than about CNN programming.

Should producers and editors have ignored metrics in favor of their own judgment and sense of mission? They routinely do this — otherwise, there’d be wall-to-wall pet stories — but to play down Trump specifically once he’d emerged as the front-runner would have been elitist and paternalistic: exactly those qualities that the news media has been derided for.

It’s because journalists remained Trump-rapt and Trump-inquisitive that he said what he did about abortion and so many voters heard it in full. Same goes for Trump’s troubling takes on violence at his rallies, nuclear weapons in Asia, the future of NATO and so much more.

It is ironic that the wall-to-wall coverage of Trump was both partly the reason for his interim success and, hopefully, his final failure. It always comes down to: do you ignore/downplay racists and xenophobes in order to not give the coverage they crave or do you publicize their hatreds in order to expose them while running the risk that you 'legitimize' them? "There are legitimate questions of proportion in regard to Trump coverage ..."

[applegrove]

2. It is like the public watching Rob Ford, drug using mayor of Toronto. Or horse

jumping or the balance beam in gymnastics. Only Trump stayed up there for months on end without falling in popularity. At some point the media needed to press him 9 times for the answer to their questions instead of giving up at 4. That happened last week and finally Trump doesn't look so powerful anymore.