High alert
by digby
Here’s a media critic telling it like it is …
It’s normal for Bob Garfield to critique the press — he does it every week as co-host of public radio program “On the Media.”
But now, he’s upping the ante exponentially, delivering strong rebukes to reporters over the airwaves and in a column for losing sight of Donald Trump’s intrinsic flaws as the presumptive Republican nominee. You know — that pattern of xenophobia, racism and misogyny that should have put Trump’s candidacy on life support months ago, according to Garfield.
“It’s about slapping a somnolent media into realizing that the stakes are extremely high,” Garfield said this week. “It’s a rare moment in American history where someone so fundamentally anti-democracy is in position to vie for the presidency.”
Comments like that show how Garfield, at least on the subject of Trump, has leaped from press criticism to advocacy, or “agitation,” as he called it.
Trump’s list of pros and cons tips heavily toward the negative in Garfield’s eyes. That’s why’s he’s so upset that the media have largely stopped challenging Trump’s divisive, hateful record while instead engaging him about his tax returns and possible picks for vice president.
To Garfield, Trump’s ascendancy represents a national emergency, and journalists are asleep at the switch.
“Why has there been no media crusade to deny him the presidency? The press jumps to warn America about missing children, tainted meat and approaching dustings of snow?” Garfield wrote this week in Mediapost. “Why are we not on high fucking alert?”
The worm is turning a bit right now although I wouldn’t place a bet on it staying that way. The press isn’t comfortable doing what Garfield prescribes because they are conditioned to believe that both sides are equivalent. If Trump manages to lower the temperature even a little bit, they’ll happily turn their attention to Clinton to help them achieve a more comfortable equilibrium. The problem is that Trump is an undisciplined amateur who is incapable of being a “normal politician” so it won’t last.
The big question then is whether the press will cover him realistically or if they will instead pathologize Clinton in order to achieve “balance.” I wouldn’t place a bet on it at this point.
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