The Media Is Finally Calling Out Trump's Toxic Demagoguery
By Joshua Holland June 20, 2016 in Rolling Stone
" Until recently, much of the mainstream media coverage of Donald Trump's campaign had been largely positive. Yes, there was some early discussion about whether he's a fascist, and plenty of stories about thuggery at his rallies but there was also a lot of what we might call a fascination with the chaotic reality-TV show that is the Trump campaign. As the Washington Post's Paul Waldman wrote earlier this month, for much of the race there's been an element of "Wow, is this election crazy or what!" in the reporting about Trump.
A recent Harvard study of Trump coverage in eight major outlets, including Fox News, concluded that the media basically propelled Trump to the nomination. In the year ahead of the primaries, "[m]ajor news outlets covered Donald Trump in a way that was unusual given his low initial polling numbersa high volume of media coverage preceded Trump's rise in the polls," wrote the researchers, noting that the candidate "received far more 'good press' than 'bad press.'" In those eight outlets alone, Trump's coverage was worth roughly $55 million in ad buys. Estimates that his overall coverage had been worth as much as $2 billion to his barebones campaign "might well be correct," wrote the authors of the study.
In recent weeks, there's been a noticeable change in tone. At least some journalists appear to have slipped off their demagoggles (to borrow a term coined by Nicole Hemmer), and are increasingly covering Trump's habitual falsehoods and stark appeals to white ethnic nationalism in plain terms.
After the Orlando massacre, Trump gave a speech doubling down on his call to bar Muslims from entering the United States. In a New York Times report the same day, Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns called Trump's blather "rife with the sort of misstatements and exaggerations that have typified his campaign," and went on to fact-check his claims on the fly. In a follow-up by Patrick Healey and Thomas Kaplan the next day, the Times reporters wrote that "Trump appears wholly focused on the idea that America has reached an existential moment and that only he can save the country, a classic tactic of demagogy."
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