Media mess

CNN had paid contributors, Donna Brazile for Clinton and Corey Landowski for Trump, who were simultaneously advisers to their respective campaigns.

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough was reportedly advising Trump.

Megyn Kelly's allegations:

In a sit down on Sunday with Fox News colleague Howard Kurtz, Kelly was asked about a passage in her book which claims that media and political journalists tipped Trump off ahead of time about upcoming tough questions in a interview. She indicated more than one network practiced this. Kelly suggests the journalists were trying to preserve their fair and impartial reputation, but, in reality, the interviews were just “acting,” as she characterized it.

CBS CEO Les Moonves (February 29, 2016):

Les Moonves, the chief executive of CBS, celebrated Donald Trump’s candidacy for the second time on Monday, calling it “good for us economically.” Moonves, speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference at the Park Hotel in San Francisco, described the “circus” of a presidential campaign and the flow of political advertising dollars, and stated that it “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS, that’s all I got to say.”

“So what can I say? The money’s rolling in, this is fun,” Moonves continued, observing that the debates had attracted record audiences.

The CBS media executive also riffed briefly about the type of campaign advertising spending produced by such a negative presidential campaign. “They’re not even talking about issues. They’re throwing bombs at each other and I think the advertising reflects that.” Moonves added, “I’ve never seen anything like this and this is going to be a very good year for us. … It’s a terrible thing to say, but bring it on, Donald, go ahead, keep going.”

 Having seen the results of all this, why would I ever go back to the TV and cable channels for news?

PS: Columbia Journalism Review's postmortem includes this striking recollection (my emphasis):

25 August 2015: Univision anchor and journalist Jorge Ramos is ejected from a Trump press conference in Iowa. Other media organizations are later banned from covering Trump events

Jorge Ramos, anchor, Univision and Fusion: In that press conference only two journalists defended me: Tom Llamas from ABC and Kasie Hunt from MSNBC. All the other journalists didn’t say anything. I think that the way we covered Trump at the beginning of his campaign was seriously flawed. The New York Times, the LA Times, Politico and the Washington Post [in September] called Donald Trump a liar. [But] it took 13 months for them to do that. At the beginning, it was seriously inappropriate.