By Don Irvine.
GOP presumptive nominee Donald Trump ripped the media for being so hostile to his campaign, in a recent interview with Fox News media critic Howie Kurtz:
“The media are very negative toward a Republican, toward a conservative Republican, and certainly very negative toward me.
They don’t report my statements properly, they’ll use the first quarter of it…There’s tremendous hostility from the media.
When I was running against 16 Republicans, it was somewhat unfair, but at least you could see it. Now it’s beyond belief. They are protecting Hillary Clinton like you wouldn’t believe. I don’t think it helps, but I think I’m going to end up winning. I’m going to end up winning big league.”
Trump has had a love/hate relationship with the media—loving them when their reports about him are positive and hating them when the coverage is negative, as it has been more so lately.
There is no doubt that the media have a liberal bias and favor the Democratic Party candidates like Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders over Trump. But he has received over $2 billion in earned, or free, media, which should give him a huge advantage over his rivals. He hasn’t always fully capitalized on that amount of free coverage—in part thanks to his blunt talk—which has been off the mark on more than one occasion.
As for his claim that he will win “big league,” that will depend on how much the voters focus on Hillary Clinton’s scandals—which seems to concern some Democrats—and Trump’s ability to convince Republicans that he is a real, not a fake, conservative.
