Donald Trump acts like Phineas Taylor Barnum, and the media covers him like well, P.T. Barnum, from Caleb Howe, Red State [1]:
RACHEL MADDOW: Why do people like Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal and Scott Walker and Jeb Bush and so many other sort of less complicated messengers of that conservative message flame out so bad and so early?
SARAH ISGUR FLORES: Well, I think one way you look at that is just tonight. Donald Trump tweets something, all of Twitter ended over his tweet about Ted Cruz’ wife. The media has covered it endlessly. How much live town halls did any of the cables cover for any of the people you just mentioned versus that the time they gave —
MADDOW: But that’s competitive advantage that he chose to try to — he ran a —
FLORES: It’s an enormous competitive advantage.
MADDOW: Right. Right, but that just means that nobody else in the field was good at competing with him on those terms.
FLORES: Or that cable news cared more about the that than the democracy that they were reporting about where you look at — I mean, $2 billion in earned media isn’t just that he was better at capturing earned media.
MADDOW: The way that — the root word of news is the word new. The reason that the news spent a lot time covering Donald Trump more then it spent covering other candidates is that every time he opened his mouth, he made some sort of controversial comment that changed the news cycle and so, people ended up following him to do that. The media wasn’t rooting for him to become president by doing that. They were following him because he was driving a good media strategy. No other Republican even competing with him on that for a second, which is a competitive failure. Not something that you can say the media choose the candidate.
FLORES: Well then, we’ve set up an incentive system moving forward where I don’t think you’re going to like the candidates you’re going to see.
video:
Maddow admits that the lame streamers could care less about the issues, but are obsessed by ratings. If we are going to get a better class of politicians, we need a better class of media.