It is common for mass media to favor one candidate or another or be a candidate’s favorite outlet.

It is unprecedented for a President and a presidential candidate to use media as their primary governing and campaigning resource.

Trump is our first President Of Media; he is a creation and a creature of media. Without it, he would not be President or have any chance at all of winning re-election.

For most of his life, say his biographers, he has been trying to manipulate the media. In Washington, he made his Hellish  Bargain. He’s figured it out.

Joe Biden has benefited from media exposure, but Donald Trump is almost nothing without it. He uses media to distract, lie, and feed his supporters, starving for outrage and grievance.

In a different time, Biden would be toast.  Donald Trump has become so vile and hateful he makes his opponent look like a saint.

Our modern media is only too happy to oblige our newest and most successful demagogue; they all smile all the way to the bank.

This is a time of great insincerity.

Almost nobody in public life actually believes what they say, and those that do – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the women of Black Lives Matter come to mind – are driven to our culture’s margins and harassed mercilessly.

Nobody in our country seems to want to live in a country with good health care, no gun violence, free child care, a longer life span, free vacations, and job security.

How can any citizen be blamed for mistrusting this system and wanting it to change? I feel for these poor people. They have created a true civic monster, he is their problem, not their solution. One way or another, they will soon learn this hard lesson.

I hope they remember how the media helped to betray them once more.

In terms of governing – I honestly don’t say this as a partisan, but as someone looking at the campaign from a distance – Trump has been the most disastrous and incompetent president in American history.

He hates democratic governance, rejects compromise or negotiation, fellates dictators, considers political opponents and critics as enemies, messed up our trade agreements, failed to get Mexico to pay for the wall, and regularly pollutes the very idea of independent governance.

He has failed to respond effectively to a single one the major issues of our time – climate change, the coronavirus pandemic, economic balance and equality, a historic deficit, racial conflict, police brutality, and systemic racism.

And I almost forget – illegals immigrants are crawling under, over, and around his little wall.

He breaks the law again and again by abusing his powers for personal gain.

Does anybody but Trump’s discredited army of Evangelicals care that Bahrain has recognized Israel? I’m Jewish, and I couldn’t care less. It has nothing to do with me.

But then, I’m not an Evangelic Christian who has lost his way and turned to blasphemy, greed, and hatred to soak up some political power.

Trump’s storied economy was focused overwhelmingly on the already wealthy, and his war in immigrants and refugees is a national stain we may never live down.

He has made us the object of ridicule worldwide, damaged the hardest fought international alliances, made us the only country on the earth to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord,   subjected refugees to cruelty and suffering, insulted soldiers and veterans, and generals.

What a novel record of accomplishment. Lots of people can’t wait for him to do it again.

The list is even longer, but enough is enough.

Trump benefits from a Perfect Storm of media changes and evolutions.  It was a marriage from Hell, a hideous marriage of greed and power.

The Internet has shattered the journalistic structure seen for years as an unofficial fourth branch of government.  U.S. Newspapers have shed half of their newsroom employees since 2008.

In 2008, there were 114,000 newsroom employees; by 2019, that number had declined to about 88,000, a loss of about 27,000 jobs.

The Internet and digital and cable media has become the primary source of news for most Americans today, a hole big enough for a shameless demagogue to walk right through and into history.

Over 65 million Americans live in counties with only one local newspaper – or none at all.

When I worked as a producer for CBS News in the early 1980’s, there were nearly 2,000 employees, and there were more than 400 fact-checkers.  My boss told me the only thing that could get me fired was putting a lie on the air and failing to spend whatever was needed to be best.

Today, there are about 400 employees altogether. They don’t get to travel much.

News programs were deliberately not rated so that producer wouldn’t feel pressure to air inaccurate or sensationalized stories.

Most media was not considered to be “left” or “right” or to speak only to liberals and conservative.  We tried to speak to everybody. That was considered unethical.

Today, it is the standard.

When media was corporatized in the late ’80s and ’90s, all programs were rated so advertisers could be charged more, and cable news channels began looking for profitable niches rather than accurate and important stories.

Thus the rise of Fox News and MSNBC and even CNN. These outlets make a lot of money off Trump but have few reporters out in the country talking to ordinary people.

Polling was much cheaper, and that became the funnel through which information is channeled to the public—what a shame. The old pundits did a much better job.

Trump’s Presidency is actually a co-production of him and Fox News and several conservative websites.

Like the country, media has branched off into a left and right. Two ways of looking at the world, any others are forbidden.

The few remaining media of influence – the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Atlantic – have almost been forced to take up left of center marketing positions, since people on the “right” have their own media now and don’t tend to pay attention to any others.

Media organizations have learned to find their own marketing niches in order to survive – the Times and the Post by reporting on President Trump and challenging him. Even the once centrist CNN re-inventing its tepid self an aggressively anti-Trump medium.

The problem is that partisanship has become profitable because it gives the news corporations marketing opportunities that draw advertisers looking for ways to reach specific buyers.

Fox makes a billion dollars a year by targeting older white men. They are grumpy and angry, but they also have lots of money to spend and plenty of advertisers who want to reach only them.

Advertisers hate to waste money on people who are not potential customers.

Fox has made it very easy for them.

Men love their toys.

A business report in the Atlantic recently on the “Trump Effect” on Cable News found that the network has destroyed the GOP, pluralism, and all adult and journalistic standards of ethics, responsibility, and decency.

And their profits are soaring.

A year before Donald Trump was elected, cable news appeared to be fading; it was in its twilight. He changed all of that.

According to the respected Pew Research Project, in 2015, Fox, CNN, and MSNBC all saw their profits surge.

New York Times media critic Jim Ruttenberg wrote about news organizations plastering Trump stories on every chyron and headline in a desperate and successful effort to win new viewers and make a lot of money.

After reaching a 21st-century peak in 2008, the average primetime viewership across the three cable news channels fell by a third by 2014. The median age of Americans watching CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News was 61, 63, and 67. In short, cable news was and is a gerontocratic kingdom where Fox News serves, asking, with more than twice the CNN audience and triple that of MSNBC.

Since Trump descended that escalator in June of 2016, wrote Derek Thompson in the Atlantic, cable news’ fortunes—particularly CNN’s—have been ascendant. Total primetime viewership for the three channels grew by 8 percent in 2015, and profits soared by about a fifth at both CNN and Fox News.

Trump may be destroying U.S. democratic norms, but he appears, for the moment, to be one big beautiful orange life raft for the flagging cable news business.

CNN has averaged 2.2 million total viewers in prime time through the first week of April 2020, more than double its viewership in the fourth quarter of 2019, and roughly 57% higher than its election-season peak, according to Nielsen data.

Fox News is up nearly 50% since the end of last year and has over four million viewers in prime-time, increasing its lead over its two main rivals.

The three networks have also seen large audience gains.

Although Trump loves to rail at “fake news,” he is its main supplier, and they are his most enthusiastic recipients and enablers. They are in business together.

It’s a convenient myth to suggest that Fox News is responsible for the mess the country is in. It takes a Media Village to create a monster like Trump. And Fox is a relatively small piece of the overall media pie.

I mean, let’s be honest. Grumpy old white men are not the favorite target of most businesses.

 Trump has shattered almost every principle of responsible journalism, standards that were sacrosanct for generations, shaping American politics.

Journalists were the enforcers, the watchers, the institution of accountability, a check and balance. See what happens without them.

Cable created this sensational new reality – they broadcast lies and distortions day and night, month after month, year after year. Trump says something almost every day that would have forced any other candidate or President into ruin, resignation, or impeachment long ago.

His assaults on the Constitution make Watergate look like a parking violation. He has reduced the powerful GOP to a cowardly and increasingly corrupt rabble of butt-kissers.

Modern media has figured out how to handle Trump by hiding behind the idea of faux fairness and equivalence.

The new ethos is he-said and she-or he-said. And then said it all again, 24/7.

There is no longer any great injustice or unacceptable behavior in this business arrangement.  Not lies, corruption, racism, or sexual harassment.

It is all on the one hand, and on the other hand, all of our politics is not a reality show.

There is no consensus on truth, fairness, decency, or morality. The poor citizen is overwhelmed by information, much of it false. How can an ordinary person sort it out?

Even the professionals can’t keep up with it.

A veteran reporter explained Washington to me this way: “Trump is a shitstorm, there is so much of it flying around and it smells so bad nobody can keep up with it.”

To appease his many oil and coal supporters, Trump pretends that he believes that climate change is a hoax, and has wiped out almost every climate change regulation or agreement. Much of it was hard-fought.

When fires burn up a million acres of forest in the Northwest, it is not presented as a scandal enabled by a complacent U.S. government; it is simply another he-said, she said political debate. Another argument.

Trump has made it so that there is no such thing as an outrage; everything is outrageous.

The New York Times coverage summed up the problem this way on its digital home page:

 “Joe Biden attacked President Trump’s record on climate change, saying his inaction and denial had fed destruction.

 President Trump blamed the wildfires not on climate change but on the failure by western states to manage their forests.“

An argument, not a catastrophe. Pick one, pick the other. We just present the arguments; you are on your own. 

The New York Times clearly knows better than to accept Trump’s absurd position at face value; they report on climate change all the time.

Presenting it as an argument (one that even Trump is known not to believe) legitimizes the idea that climate change is a hoax, even as it destroys the lives of hundred sof thousands of people and kills many others.

They make it easy to dismiss it.

Every day, Trump holds one kind of press conference or another and lies about almost everything he says. Every day, the media broadcasts and reports his lies, and then claim to be shocked to discover that millions of people believe them.

And why shouldn’t they?

Most people assume that if cable news channels broadcast hours and hours of commentary and opinion from a President, it might be true. Why would they broadcast if they knew it was a lie?

What a good question.

The answer is really quite simple. It makes money, even if the price we all pay is the erosion of our electoral system, our country’s future, and the criminal misrepresentation of a pandemic.

Trump and the media love to pretend to hate each other, but that is another lie, this time on both sides.

Journalists follow Trump around everywhere, fly on his plane, ride in his motorcades, wait for him like hungry puppies on the White House lawn, slobbering eagerly to pass on ever falsehood and vicious attack, and pretend they are challenging him.

They are his court-in-waiting, his transmitters, and broadcasters, his heralds. Once in a while, they ask him a tough question; most of the time, they just repeat what he says and call it work.

Challenging him would mean getting out of the White House, going home, talking to humans,  and reporting on the government rather than be the willing transmitter of lies and cruelty.

Joe Biden is not nearly as charismatic as Trump, nor is he so willfully outrageous and sensational. He will never get as much air time as Trump does.

He is fortunate that Trump is so obnoxious and hateful now that so many people are coming to hate him and are getting weary of his nastiness.

But even then, it is close. He has months left to take over thousands of hours of air time and talk and talk. He is Big Brother in 1984, always on the wall.

Journalists are happy to transmit every lie about the President’s opponent – that he is senile, demented, corrupt, and stupid. That he hates God and supports the murder of police officers. They add a few timid disclaimers and hold their noses.

Journalism puts some lotion on their culpability by using words like “undocumented,” or “without evidence,” as if every viewer will notice this and dismiss the accusations as false.

We see every day that this doesn’t happen.

Tens of millions of Americans believe the pandemic was a hoax, that Antifa killers are organizing to murder conservatives, that our election system is riddled with fraud, that socialists are planning to take over the country.

Journalism was never meant to be an enabling institution. It evolved, for all of its flaws, as a check on power and its abuse.

Greedy corporations changed all of those lofty ideas; profit comes first and trumps any other democratic value.

Trump is our first truly media President.

Neither he nor his fawning Fox commentators and supporters believe a single word they say. There is no ideology involved, only ratings and money.

The network founders were right – ratings have destroyed the credibility of broadcast news.

Fox sets the agenda for our lazy President, who has none of his own, and everybody profits: Trump has a powerful mouthpiece waiting to praise and defend him, and Fox makes a billion dollars.

That is how Corporate Think works.

We put up with it; we deserve it. We watch and listen, and then go on Facebook and Twitter to argue and stew.

Is there a silver lining in this mess? I think so. Organizations like the New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Atlantic are also thriving, expanding their digital footprints and calling Trump on some of his worst instincts and lies.

They have done some astounding reporting in the last two years. When this nightmare ends, which it inevitably will, we will owe them a great debt.

Trump may have boosted the earnings of Fox News, but he is also boosting the earnings and audience of lots of other media outlets as well. He is saving journalism in a number of ways.

I don’t buy the idea that journalism is dead; I buy the idea that journalism deserved to die in its old form and is already re-inventing itself for the future.

Look for some powerhouse news on new media, from Tik Tok to the new kind of newspaper.

Trump has spurred a great awakening among women,  suburban and otherwise, African-Americans,  black and white journalists,  young people, and ordinary Americans who yearn for a more normal life and a more empathetic President.

Wouldn’t it be nice, said a recent TV ad, if we didn’t wake up worrying what the President said, and if the President woke up worrying about us?

The New York Times digital platform has exploded; the Washington Post has hired more than 50 new reporters this year alone.

Journalism’s finest and most influential hours (think William Paley at CBS), John Knight, even William  Randolph Hearst) were funded by millionaires and wealthy business people,  who expanded the media’s reach and power.

Some were better than others, but they paid for journalism to be relevant and vigilant.

That is happening again.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has insulated the Washington Post from the hemorrhaging affecting most newspapers, Laurene Powell Jobs has made the Atlantic the most influential and substantial magazine in America. She and Bezos can give their publications a lot of support for a very long time.

They are two of the richest people on the planet.

These people and publications are re-shaping our journalism idea, beginning its inevitable revitalization, recognizing its importance. In a curious way, we are going back to the old way of doing it.

Just as women are learning the importance of women in positions of power,  the country is learning the consequences of leaving journalism to Hedge Fund ghouls and cereal manufacturers and corporate cable channels.

We see that journalism needs to change, just like police departments need to change.

A lot of people in America have learned a lot of lessons in the past four years. I am one of them.