Having just listened to Morning Joe and the MSNBC talking heads ever so gentle admission that they were biased in the early days of the campaign, I was disgusted. They appeared to be deriding themselves, just a bit, in order to avoid the mantle of rigging the election given to them by Donald Trump,
We don’t need 24/7 news. There isn’t 24/7 news of interest to enough people watching. We need journalism and for the most part, we didn’t get it. We got cable news catering to whatever gave them ratings which was 24/7 Trump. The excuses given by assorted MSNBC talking heads were lame at best. Worse, they they ignored history or just plain were ignorant of it. One analogy drawn was the shift from Hubert Humphrey to George Wallace in 1968. A heavy reason for this was the disgust with Humphrey’s behavior, refusing to oppose Johnson’s Vietnam war stand. True, there were some in the south that had other leanings but Wallace was only serious because of the war. No one even cared to mention it. In fact, as one who lived through it, Humphrey finally accidentally came to his senses after he made an inadvertent comment, a convenient mistake, and many of the pols of the time were sure that given another couple of weeks, Humphrey, coming on strong would probably have won the election.
Ignoring Bernie Sanders was bad enough but TV’s job was not to give Trump hours and hours of free public exposure. I don’t think it was an accident. I clearly remember when a guest on MSNBC asked about Bernie Sanders huge rallies, he was told by Steve Kornacki “we’ll get to that another time.” When Trump came out with his Mexican declaration, the journalists should have run him out of town right at the beginning, which they could have done. The republican debates might have been about issues instead of Megan Kelly’s menstrual cycle, Jeb Bush’s energy, Ted Cruz’s father, poll numbers or Trump’s penis size. Then maybe the latent racism wouldn’t have been given legitimacy by Trump rallies.
Even now, treating Trump as a normal candidate by trying to be even-handed in these disgusting final days, is a disgrace. He is only a serious candidate because the TV news media created him. Who he is and his own mouth and the non-stop coverage which made him are now defeating him. Now is not the time to get a conscience. TV journalists should oppose Trump in the strongest terms, without apology. He is not a normal candidate, he is obviously mentally disturbed and they all know it.
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