And I just find myself wondering, “What took you guys so long?”
My beef, however, is less with Trump (who is a self promoting blowhard to the core) and more with the media who do not seem to feel the need to do anything other than ‘feed the beast’ and sell advertising time. And when I say, “Feed the Beast” I mean that the mainstream media outlets don’t seem to follow any other dictum in deciding what to put onscreen other than, “If it bleeds it leads.” Even if the ‘bleeding’ is just a fatuous real-estate developer with an outsize ego running his mouth and attempting to stoke up controversy to promote his ‘reality’ show and engage in his public displays of masturbatory self admiration while stoking racism tinged conspiracy theories that lead nowhere other than into a self perpetuation news cycle where the same story returns, again and again, like the killer in a series of brain-dead slasher films.
Perhaps if someone like Donald Trump wants to make stupid statements about Obama’s birth certificate, it is “news.” But why does it have to be reported witht he same gravity and given the same level of coverage as our two wars in the Middle East or the US budget? Why have the major media outlets given self promoting, ‘personal memoir’ writing, reality show starring media whores like Trump and Palin and all the rest so much airtime and softball questions with cozy brown-nosing television personalities? Why can’t we have a sense of proportion? Why do we need these perrenial ‘junk stories’ clouding the view of more serious matters? Why can’t more producers at NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, etc., say to themselves, “Okay, let’s take 5 minutes for the bullshit stories after we get done with Afghanistan, the Budget, North Korea and jobs…“
It’s not a matter of the media ‘playing politics.’ I don’t think asking the media to have a “sense of proportion” is asking too much. Nobody likes bad news; that doesn’t mean that we don’t need to hear it… especially when it is something we may need to deal with.