Donald Trump may be in deep trouble: The press is finally figuring out how to cover the “billionaire” bigot; BillMoyers.com via Salon, 6/5/16

Todd Gitlin, BillMoyers.com via Salon; Donald Trump may be in deep trouble: The press is finally figuring out how to cover the “billionaire” bigot:

"CBS president Leslie Moonves has deservedly come in for scorn with his grotesque, though accurate, proclamation that the Trump phenomenon “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” Let that Moonves statement be engraved in stone in the lobby of every journalism school in America, adding a single word in a grosser font: BEWARE.

But Moonves in mid-gaffe was only spilling the obvious (as in Michael Kinsley’s definition of a gaffe: when a politician tells the truth). Though journalists may chortle or blush at such eruptions of truth, they never stop to note the unseemliness of broadcast networks piling up profits while their stations are government-licensed at no cost. It would, I suppose, be indecorous to point out that the airwaves belong to the nation and that broadcast networks have obligations to public life...

Whatever the scale of the current cable TV rethink, Trump goes on trumpeting. He continues to rant his way through falsehoods — most recently spending 12 minutes at a rally denouncing the Indiana-born judge hearing the fraud lawsuit brought against his “Trump University” — a judge who, Trump said, “happens to be, we believe, Mexican.” In the spirit of informing the public of the character and prejudices of the candidates who come before them, it’s a good sign that many journalists took note of the ethnic insinuation. It’s a sign that they’ve stopped bending over backwards to avoid the obvious. It’s a sign that, at least for now, they’re walking away from the role of — in the late Village Voice journalist Jack Newfield’s memorable words — “stenographers with amnesia.”"