Trump’s the Wrong Man to Attack the Media

During the primaries, I used to refer to the O'Reilly 

Factor as the BILL & DONNIE SHOW

But the media need to be held accountable.

‘If the disgusting and corrupt media covered me honestly and didn’t put false meaning into the words I say,” Donald Trump tweeted on Sunday, “I would be beating Hillary by 20%.” “My rallies are not covered properly by the media. They never discuss the real message and never show crowd size or enthusiasm.” “I am not only fighting Crooked Hillary, I am fighting the dishonest and corrupt media.” Apparently, the Republican presidential nominee has just discovered that the media are biased.

Media room at the GOP debate in Simi Valley, Calif., 

September 15, 2015. (Mario Anzuoni/Reuters)

Well, who can blame him? After all, he and the media, especially the television media, have had a mutually beneficial relationship for much of this election season. As the New York Times wrote this spring, Trump earned the equivalent of $1.9 billion in free media between the announcement of his candidacy in June and March. In February, he earned $400 million in free media — as the Times notes, “about what John McCain spent on his entire 2008 presidential campaign.” Meanwhile, Trump spent just $10 million on ads.

Did the other GOP candidates have their own cheerleader 

on every day at noon like Andrea TRUMPteros?

Or put it in hours. “Trump has been the subject of the clear majority (62 percent) of candidate-focused TV coverage of the Republican race,” FiveThirtyEight.com wrote in March. When CNN — which Trump has now nicknamed the “Clinton News Network” — mentioned a Republican presidential candidate during the primary season, 55 percent of the time it was Trump. (Second was Marco Rubio, with a measly 10.2 percent.) It was a commonplace during the primary season for networks to cut away from a speech by another candidate in favor of an empty Trump-campaign podium.

Read the rest of Ian Tuttle's op-ed HERE.

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