It's the media!

Let's talk a bit about media coverage of the election, it is fair to say that we would not be in the campaign we are in if the media hadn't covered it they way it did, by some estimates, Trump received some two billion dollars in free media exposure since his announcement last year, it is pretty hard to compete against that kind of exposure, and it served him well in the primaries because the voters he was competing for then considered the horrible things he was saying to be positives.

When talking about the media, we have to keep in mind that the largest news organizations are not actually interested in doing journalism, that died when the companies became massive conglomerates devoted to their stock market price. For them, Trump being in the campaign was like printing money, suddenly, millions of people wanted to watch him, viewership on the debates was ridiculously high, can you imagine it? Republican primary debates with a dozen people were drawing ratings comparable to Monday Night Football, and every time Trump said something crazy people tuned in or clicked links to hear about it.

Soon it became clear, to some anyway, that Trump was actually in for a long run, but he was still a horrible short fingered vulgarian with no actual policy ideas other than building a wall. Media coverage spent a while taking him seriously, or at least trying to, they had hundreds of interviews with Trump and his campaign representatives during which they took the statements and views said by these madmen seriously, there was virtually no pushback or critique, just acceptance and in some cases, encouragement. Strangely enough CNN was the worst culprit here, going so far as to hire ex-Trump campaign chair Corey Lewandowski as a commentator with a mid six figure salary, but all the networks played a part.

We can't blame the networks entirely of course, the Republican field was about the most uninspiring group of religious nuts, grifters, and psychopaths that you can imagine, and that's an accomplishment people, I mean I described them as a group of religious nuts, grifters, and psychopaths, and they were uninspiring, sometimes terrifying, but usually just boring. JEB! stumbled directly out of the gate with the simplest of questions about the Iraq War, and as a Bush, he should have been practicing responses to that question for about a decade straight. And he was probably the most competent one! Well okay that was Kasich, but Bush was close.

Anyway, none of them took Trump seriously despite the clear shift in the media showing they were willing to give him a shot, but virtually no opposition research was done until 2016, and by then it was far too late, they had handed Trump control of the narrative, and the media happily gave it to him.

So now a woefully unprepared and unqualified candidate suddenly has to go up against Hillary Fucking Clinton, a woman who bleed politics and who has literally spent a lifetime enduring the harshest of personal attacks from her enemies while doing almost nothing but preparing to run for office, there is no person better prepared to be president or to run against Donald Trump. In a sane world there is no way that this is a contest.

But if the run ends, so does the party, so stupid narratives like Benghazi or the emails scandal, the latter of which might have actually been worth talking about at some point if the entire thing hadn't been bungled and dragged out for so long that no one actually gives a damn anymore, had to be kept up, the illusion that Trump was making it a close campaign had to be kept going.

It's called the horse race narrative, and it is predicated on the fact that if roughly half the population likes one side, and the other half likes the other, it will result in the largest amount of viewership possible. While I am sure some individuals involved were simply clinging to their old models of how things were supposed to go and just denying that Trump was a game changed this year, possibly forever, but we can't know that yet, I believe that many have made the conscious decision to give the illusion of impartiality while essentially shilling for Trump.

Barack Obama spent a good deal of time at his final White House Correspondents dinner excoriating the press for this exact thing, it was pretty funny, and awkward as hell to watch the tables of reporters and media figures force out smiles as he gave them shit for being mealymouthed dweebs who shat on the legacy of journalism they purport to represent in favor of being paid off by the powers they should be reporting on.

It is becoming increasingly clear however that the country as a whole isn't quite buying it anymore, it worked in the primary because those who disagreed with Trump watched to see how far the madness would spread, and those who agreed watched because, well, they agreed with him, but now the general population is paying attention, and the horse race narrative isn't working because this isn't a horse race, the Trump campaign never even bought a horse and is only now even doing research on hoofed mammals in general, at this rate by November they will have a cow. Media control of the narrative is proving to be limited at this point and the more they attempt to push the idea that this is an even race, the less seriously people take them, as well they should.

There are cracks showing, commentators and round table discussions after rallies are actually asking questions of the Trump campaign that should have been asked this whole time, stuff like "Why is Paul Manafort part of this?" Or, "Do you really think describing an entire minority population as unemployed and living in trashed inner cities is going to get any of them to vote for you?" Stuff like that.

If the media can't have a horse race, a bloodbath is an acceptable runner up, hopefully not literally but they'll take that too.