The MSM hates Trump, and trashes him at every opportunity, and it just makes him stronger.
Washington Post: Tuesday’s edition of the “NBC Nightly News” closed with a video editorial by the newscast’s former anchor, Tom Brokaw, who said that “Trump’s promise to ban all Muslims from coming to America is more — much more — than a shouted campaign provocation. Trump’s statement, even in this season of extremes, is a dangerous proposal that overrides history, the law and the foundation of America itself.”
Brokaw added that “ISIS is likely to use Donald Trump’s statements as a recruiting tool” and went so far as to reference Japanese American internment camps, McCarthyism and Nazi Germany.
On NPR’s “Morning Edition” on Wednesday, longtime public radio host Diane Rehm, who plans to retire next year as host of her eponymous syndicated current-events talk show, explained to Steve Inskeep why she feels compelled to stay on the air through the 2016 presidential election.
“What’s happening now strikes me as something bizarre,” she said, seeming to reference Trump without naming him. “People are appealed to in the most fundamental, irrational terms rather than through persuasion, through discourse, through understanding key points. I want to help continue that rational discussion through the next campaign.”
And on MSNBC on Wednesday night, Dan Rather, Brokaw’s former counterpart as lead CBS anchor, asserted that “what [Trump] said about immigration and limiting immigrants … is the best propaganda tool that ISIS has had in a very long time.”
Now, Brokaw, Rehm and Rather don’t have the clout today that Cronkite did in 1968. No one does. That’s just the reality of media fragmentation and declining faith in the press overall. And, in Rather’s case, some have never forgiven him for the flawed report on President George W. Bush’s National Guard service that preceded his resignation.
But they’re about as heavy as the media heavyweights come these days — in different ways — and Trump will almost surely absorb their body blows, as he has so many others, and just keep swinging. He seems to grow stronger with every media fusillade.
There might be some voters who take the words of Brokaw, Rehm and Rather to heart. And these decorated journalists are only doing what they believe their jobs and consciences demand. But it is increasingly clear that if Trump’s supporters ultimately do fall away, it won’t be because the media talked them out of voting for him.
I don’t know whether Trump heard what this trio said. But I’m reasonably confident that he did not turn to an aide and say anything like, “If I’ve lost Tom Brokaw, I’ve lost the election.”
