News media finally admit role as Trump's accomplice before and after 2016 election

Freelancer Milt Priggee of PoliticalCartoons.com and other editorial cartoonists have treated Donald J. Trump far more harshly than newspaper, TV and radio reporters. Here, Priggee shows two migrant children impaled on Trump's Statue of Liberty crown, basically calling the president a murderer.

Cartoonist Bill Day labels Trump's claim of a crisis or emergency at our southern border just another lie.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

HACKENSACK, N.J. -- The New York Times is the first major news organization to concede the media acted as Donald J. Trump's willing accomplice during the 2016 presidential campaign.

On the cover of last Sunday's Opinion section, Frank Bruni's byline appears over these headlines:

Will the Media

Be Trump's

Accomplice 

Again?

We have a second chance in 2020.

Let's not blow it.

Bruni questions the degree to which the media will "let him [President Trump] set the terms of the 2020 presidential campaign, about our appetite for antics [such as Trump's frequent insults] versus substance, and whether we'll repeat the mistakes that we made in 2016 and continued to make during the first stages of presidency. There were plenty."

2015 and 2016

In 2015, when the New York developer declared his candidacy, "the number of stories about Trump in the country's most influential newspapers and on its principal newscasts significantly exceeded what his support in the polls at the time justified," said Bruni, quoting Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.

"The volume and tone of the coverage helped propel Trump to the top of Republican polls," wrote the center's Thomas Patterson.

"In stark contrast," Bruni said, "stories about Hillary Clinton in 2015 were mostly negative."

In the first half of 2016, Trump commanded much more coverage that any other candidate from either party, and it was evenly balanced between positive and negative appraisals -- "unlike the coverage of Clinton, which remained mostly negative," Bruni said.

Only during their general election face-off, "on topics relating to the candidates' fitness for office, Clinton and Trump's coverage were virtually identical in terms of its negative tone," Patterson wrote.

"'Regarding their fitness for office, they were treated identically?' In retrospect, that's madness. It should have been in real time, too," Bruni concludes.

And at another point, he notes "The president doesn't hate journalists, not at all. He uses us."

Read: Will the Media Fail Again?

Endless lies

Although The Times and the Washington Posts have led the media in fact-checking every Trump statement and claim, both have been reluctant to label them as lies, preferring "false and misleading claims" and similarly weak language.

And no White House reporter has told Trump to his face, "Please stop lying to the American people."

Instead, most have knocked themselves out to be first to send his endless lies around the nation and world in yet another one of those maddening sound bites.

Bruni's opinion piece in The Times followed by one week "The People vs. Donald Trump," David Leonhardt's argument that "the United States has never had a president as demonstrably unfit for office as Trump," and he should be removed from office.

Jimmy Margulies, former editorial cartoonist for The Record of Woodland Park, notes furloughed government workers support the wall, "if it keeps out bill collectors."

Cartoonist Christopher Weyant of the Boston Globe also invokes the con job of a crisis on our southern border. Here, Trump is nothing less than a con artist.