Live from Trumpland: It is now the eighth day after the real start of the presidential campaign at Labor Day. And for eight days the United States's media-industrial complex has been frantically and diligently engaged in the normalization of Donald Trump--a grifter, a bigot, a liar, a con man, and a clown.
Shame on them. Shame on them all. Of all those political-reporter employees of newspapers and TV channels whose words have crossed my screen this morning, only David Farenthold has done his job properly.
Simon Wren-Lewis: Trump, Brexit and Balance:
It is with a dreadful sense of inevitability that I’m watching what is happening in the US general election between Clinton and Trump....
Just as the media in the UK normalised the flat out lies of the Brexit campaign, so the media in the US is normalising Donald Trump. In both cases this stems from an obsession with balance. With the Brexit campaign the media balanced the lie about £350 million a week to the NHS with Remain’s claims (based on analysis using consensus economics) about the economic damage that leaving the single market would do. With the US general election, Trump's stream of well documented lies are balanced against seemingly baseless insinuations about Clinton.
