The language of the media and Trump

[_MeDotOrg]

I think we are see an gradual evolution in the coverage of Donald Trump. For a long time Trump was a lot smarter than the media. He got a lot of free coverage by making outrageous statement and sucking all of the oxygen out of a new cycle. It's a very effective tactic when you're trying to reduce the amount of media time available to all of your opponents. No one was better at this than Trump, and he played the media like a violin.

Sometime after the election, I think the media started to wake up and realize that journalism in the age of Trump was no longer going to be the Marquess de Queensbury boxing rules. Donald Trump has gotten away with saying a lot of outrageous things as a candidate that he will now get called out on as President.

Case in point: Trump's claim that he would have won the popular vote if 3-5 million illegals hadn't voted. There has not been a shred of evidence to support this claim, which he repeated to Congress today.

If Trump believes millions of people voted illegally, that is a serious breach in the legitimacy of our elections. And you'd think if this was really a problem, Republicans would be able to back this up with statistics like white on rice. And if not, that they would be calling for massive bipartisan investigations into the problem.

But none of that is happening. There is just the claim, floating like a bubble of Breitbart gas, that millions of people voted illegally. So let's call a spade a spade, shall we? The New York Times did. Their headline read

Trump Repeats Lie About Popular Vote in Meeting With Lawmakers

To me, it is extraordinarily sad that our President's behavior makes the press his factual babysitter. But if they merely report what he says, they are reducing themselves to a regurgitation machine for the prevarications of our Liar in Chief.