The Media, The Republican Party, And Trump

With the reality of an amoral, avaricious media salivating over record ratings and revenue as a result of the on-going Donald "Rump" Trump- led freak show that is the race for the Republican Party "presidential" nomination (=cough= Jeff "Moneypucker" Zucker =cough=), some are beginning to call them out for their "coverage."  Here's just a recent sampling (as always, follow the links for more detail).

From Bernie Sanders' interview last night with Rachel Maddow:

[T]he Republican Party today now is a joke, maintained by a media which really does not force them to discuss their issues.

E.J. Dionne, Jr., on how a phony media narrative is distorting what's really going on in the country:

... [I]n the wall-to-wall coverage of Trump, the backlash around race and how he is courting it deserve far more scrutiny — even if this means The Donald might turn down a television network’s offer to do yet another telephone interview, in his pajamas, if he wishes.

At the least, the media might start asking whether the president’s popularity and Trump’s relative lack of it tell us something very important about what is happening in our nation that is being utterly lost in the clamor of Trumpism. We are allowing a wildly and destructively inaccurate portrait of us as a people to dominate our imaginations and debase our thinking.

President Obama at the Toner Prize ceremony earlier this week on media accountability:

... Because while fairness is the hallmark of good journalism, false equivalency all too often these days can be a fatal flaw.  If I say that the world is round and someone else says it's flat, that's worth reporting, but you might also want to report on a bunch of scientific evidence that seems to support the notion that the world is round.  And that shouldn’t be buried in paragraph five or six of the article.  (Applause.) 

A job well done is about more than just handing someone a microphone.  It is to probe and to question, and to dig deeper, and to demand more.  The electorate would be better served if that happened.  It would be better served if billions of dollars in free media came with serious accountability, especially when politicians issue unworkable plans or make promises they can’t keep. 

In the real world, we'd wager corporate media will choose shekels over scrutiny every time.  But it's good to see this discussion finally rising to this level.

BONUS:  Driftglass shows us how the media plays the false equivalency game, even while it wonders how we got to Trump.

BONUS II:   A good example of how the clickbait- obsessed media =cough= Washington Post =cough= willfully gets played by Republican trolls.