Headlines of New York newspapers. Press Association/Richard B. Levine SIPA USA. All rights reserved. I spent most of 2016 doing my duty as citizen, writer and educator aghast at the favours done for the unprincipled, incoherent, vicious, dangerous ignoramus Donald Trump by the business known as “the media,” formerly known as “the press” — an enterprise accorded privileges by the US Constitution on the quaint eighteenth-century belief that if the people are informed, they will make better judgments than if they are less so. Detailing the incomprehensions, incapacities, failures, inadequacies and airbrushings over the course of many months was not, for me, a feel-good exercise, but I judged it preferable to sitting at home griping, ranting and snarling to my family and friends while my mind exploded in the knowledge that the rudder was coming off the ship of state even if some last-minute reprieve might be granted.
The media licensed the mountebank for his latest star turn, upgraded him, credited His Fraudulence with a talent for lying when they were not marveling at his blunt originality. They presidentialised him, accorded him their most fulsome praise (interesting!), oo-ed and ah-ed at the spectacle of his shiny performances, surely (you have to admit!) a little bit different from the boring same-old-same-old policy proposals (and wasn’t that refreshing!). There were the favours of commission, like granting him a wad of unpaid broadcast time greater than that received by all the other candidates put together; the puffball “interviews” which he deigned to phone in to slavering “news” personnel; their fascination with his appearances even as their cameras showed — Breaking News! — crowds staring at empty platforms.
But I will not here review the manifold ways in which these dog-and-pony shows called “news” helped him hold a (for him) fortunately distributed 46% of American voters in thrall; the rapt attention they paid to his birther lie and many succeeding lies, fabrications and brazen flights from truth; their deference when he lied and repeated his lies; the false equivalencies, as if the many thousands of mainstream uproars about “Benghazi” and “emails” and “Clinton Foundation” were, in and of themselves, worthy of notice as magic hate triggers that did not have to be attached to true-or-false propositions to ring out as self-evidently newsworthy accusations.
