How’s that title for pedantic??
This is my last rant on the subject.
Looking back on the year, I have been incredibly disappointed in the media for its complicity in creating the monster called candidate Donald Trump. You cannot give a person hours and hours of free public air time and print space because of disgusting outrageous pronouncements and then point excitedly to polls which you have skewed in his favor. You created a self generating evolution of a joke into a serious candidate and continue to compound it by giving him even more attention. I admit that the print media has not been as bad as radio and TV, but bad enough.
Campaign by poll numbers is something that has never happened before. Issues, what are they? Many of the people populating our media who have the chutzpah to call themselves journalists say he is entertaining. This is the presidency of the US, we are talking about. What sick minds consider what Trump says and does entertaining? You have a mandate to report the news and, yes, provide commentary and analysis, left, right and center, but not to give free public exposure to a lunatic.
Now, I cannot fault the media completely. They are only complicit. I have lived elsewhere in the world and I can truly say that the American electorate is by far, to say it nicely, the least informed in the western world. The people Mr. Trump caters to, are at the low end, and mistakenly direct their anger at the Washington establishment which ironically consists of the very representatives they have, by voting against their own self-interest sent there. But what the Trumpees (and many others) are really angry at is the realization, frightening for them, that there is a black man in the white house who is extremely intelligent, focused on sound objectives, free from scandal, personal or otherwise and despite overwhelming opposition has been eminently successful. To call what Trump caters to xenophobia, minimizes it. It is racism pure and simple.
The other major contributor to this madness has been the Citizen’s United decision which allowed big contributors to set up superpacs, each to fund its own favorite candidate. This created the nineteen candidate clown car which is still, despite some dropouts, in double digits. The sane possible republican candidates have been buried by a resounding lack of attention, with media claiming that their poll numbers are low and that Trump has sucked the air out of the room. Don’t connect your media vacuum cleaner to the room and then claim the air is sucked out. You did it yourselves. And to make matters even worse, enter that profound intellectual Sarah Palin in support of him to suck out any air that you might have left.
Bernie Sanders, in contrast, whether you agree with him or not, has managed to wage a serious issue campaign, attract myriad supporters and donors, despite virtually perfunctory coverage by the media until only a few weeks ago. And to compare Sanders’ leftist campaign to Trump’s rightist “I don’t know what to call it” campaign in the interest of being fair and balanced, is offensive. No matter what his poll numbers, Trump is still a frightening joke.
I say to the media as attorney Joseph Welch said in 1953 to Senator Joe McCarthy, “Have you no shame?”
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