Does Donald Trump lead the race for the Republican presidential nomination? Or does he lead it by a “yuuuuuge” margin? Bloomberg recently released a poll that gave Trump 24 percent to Ben Carson’s 20 percent. On the same day, Ipsos released a poll that put Trump at 37 percent to Carson’s 14 percent. Normally, I’d suggest you average the results and move on. But these two polls are emblematic of a deep divide this year first noted by Jonathan Robinson: The Bloomberg poll was conducted over the phone with live interviewers; the Ipsos poll was conducted online.
This is a model with which political analysts are extremely familiar. Many still think it fits, that Trump will flame out and the establishment will rally around an alternative.
Maybe so. But Trump's dominance has gone on longer than anyone predicted, and it is making all kinds of people nervous, including the establishment media — the Sunday shows, horse race pundits, and Villagers who have become such an integral part of the Beltway political class.
Their trepidation has less to do with the fact of Trump lying than with the way he lies. They don't mind being properly lied to; it's all part of the game. What they cannot countenance is being rendered irrelevant. Trump is not kissing the ring. He barely bothers to spin the media. He does not need them, or give two shits what centrist pundits think. Their disapproval only strengthens him. Media gatekeepers are in danger of being exposed as impotent bystanders. …
The [GOP base] anger is understandable, even justifiable in many ways, but unfortunately it also involves believing lots of nonsense. And no amount of understanding and empathy can make Jade Helm anything but, factually speaking, nonsense.
Thus the dilemma. The old-guard political media has always seen itself as a disinterested referee. But what they confront now is aggressive, unapologetic nonsense, piped up from a nationalist, ethnocentric, revanchist conservative base through the mouth of one Donald J. Trump. He is forcing them to choose sides, to accept his bare assertions and make a mockery of their purported allegiance to accuracy ... or to call him out and, in the eyes of his supporters, formally align against him.
The conceptual space for neutrality has all but disappeared. Media outlets are being forced to take sides, and facing the grim possibility that even if they do, they have no power to affect the outcome. Their twin idols — objectivity and influence — are being exposed as illusions. That's what has them so anxious about Donald Trump.
As a blogger, there is no such dilemma (Trump is a lying fascist. See, was that hard?)
I half expect media to call for a blogger ethics conference to resolve the issue.
