Moonves is signaling very clearly that his intention is to saturate the market with Trump, which translates to Web traffic and eventually to votes. He’s not interested in what conservative candidates have to say policy-wise or politically. The casual Kardashian voter isn’t attuned to an endorsement by Jeff Sessions or a hashtag on Twitter. They are paying attention to outlets such as ET!, TMZ, Inside Edition, the CBS evening news, CNN, and MSNBC, where Trump’s quotes about shooting voters on Fifth Avenue are played ad nauseam.
Trump supporters who believe their candidate is the anti-establishment destroyer of media are being conned, and the con is being perpetrated by the people they hate the most — the Clintonistas of network media. Not only are these people generally hostile to conservatism. They also are not content to simply sit on the sidelines and objectively report what candidates say and do. Recall Dan Rather and Mary Mapes, who took it upon themselves in 2004 to run an unverified story about George W. Bush’s military service. In charge of CBS at the time? Les Moonves.
Is it possible, however, that conservatives, in the eight short months between July 2015 and today, have beaten down the media bias of the past 30 years and entered the mainstream at long last? Or is more likely that networks are happily using Trump’s always-provocative sound bites to confirm every nasty anti-conservative cliché they’ve nurtured for decades? If you guessed Option Two, you’re sane: Network media are actively engineering the Republican primaries and choosing the candidate they believe will be best suited to go up against Hillary Clinton — and lose.
MSNBC doesn’t put Donald Trump on their network almost daily, and Trump doesn’t thank Chris Matthews for being “fair” to him, because MSNBC or Trump suddenly have the best interests of conservatives in mind. In 2012, CNN was all too happy to put Candy Crowley on a debate stage to defend Barack Obama from Mitt Romney. Thus year, CNN invited former American Idol contestant Clay Aiken to give analysis on Super Tuesday. Aiken is a failed democratic candidate for Congress (he ran and lost in 2014), and, like Trump, his main experience is as a reality-TV star. This is all thanks to CNN head Jeff Zucker, an old Bill Clinton friend who gives Trump airtime as a way of making millions in ad revenue while simultaneously helping to put another Clinton into the White House.
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