PREACH.
marmelade
Hudson Hongo
8/03/16 1:41am
The damn press could have saved us all a lot of grief by taking this guy out eighteen months ago, when it became clear the vicious old megalomaniac was actually going to run. There isn’t a single Trump revelation out there right now—his corruption, his racism, his shady business and political associates and practices, his colossal ignorance, his paranoia, his capacity for infantile rage, his staggering narcissism and unprecedented unfitness for high office—that couldn’t have been out there months ago if only our political press had done its job.
Sure, some of the details would have been different (he hadn’t yet had time to insult a Gold Star family, for instance) but the coverage would have come in plenty of time to save the Republican Party, the poor old long-suffering USA, and the rest of the civilized world, from this ghastly clown show.
Also, it would have saved us from the small but non-trivial possibility that the son of a bitch could actually win this thing and take us all straight down the tubes. All that nightmare scenario would require would be for our deeply anti-Hillary political press to react like Pavlov’s dogs the next time Julian Assange and Vladimir Putin ring a bell: and don’t think they won’t.
Anyhow, it doesn’t do to forget that we’re in this kettle of stinking fish because adult human beings who get paid to do journalism spent quality time rolling over to have their tummies scratched by Trump. Joe and Mika may have betrayed him in the end, but for months they, along with the rest of the political press, acted as adoring surrogates, providing Trump with endless access and giddily normalizing his toxic candidacy. CNN is still caught in a kind of Jekyll-Hyde loop—half uneasy criticism, half adoration, and the worst half of both. CBS and NBC are almost as bad.
From mid-2015 until just a few months ago, Trump coverage consisted largely of reporters gushing about the supposedly revolutionary nature of his candidacy, the large crowds he drew, their adoration, his supposedly deft exploitation of the “politics of outrage,” his mastery of presidential gravitas every time he didn’t boast about his penis on national TV—in short, bullshit, big steaming platters of it.
They were simply gaga for the guy: and even as they scramble half-heartedly to undo the worst of the damage, the fact is that they’ve really let us in for it.
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