Yeah, if Trump did leak this anodyne part of his return himself, then Maddow played right into his hand.
I mean, I don’t usually like to feed into the “mastermind Trump playing 4D chess manipulating and distracting people” narrative, but this really couldn’t have gone better for him. I don’t really think it’s what happened, but it’s certainly possible this is his admin’s doing.
I also dislike the mastermind hypothesis, since it sounds like I’m awarding him credit for being a Machiavellian snake. The trouble is that the media consistently falls for his tricks. He really is like a third-rate magician, telling everyone where to look, and the media goes along with it instead of looking where they are supposed to, which would be literally anywhere else.
The truly horrifying thing about Trump’s manipulation of the media is that it appears that the media hasn’t operated in a free market of information until recently. What I mean by that is that there has always been the veneer, and occasionally the substance, of real journalism in this country, where reputable news outlets simply wouldn’t publish the manipulative utterances of a career con-man. News outlets would police each other so as to maintain their veneers, while gossip magazines gladly filled the public’s need for sensationalist and misleading alternative facts without the public mistaking it for actual fact. The often unwritten rules of journalism have prevented such a situation as this…until now.
Now the media has been so thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the American people that the unwritten rules of journalism have been, by necessity, discarded in favor of a market approach to information, where there are no gatekeepers guarding the public from statements designed to override their rational minds.
Once Trump could no longer be ignored in the Republican primary, it became inconvenient for any media outlet to ignore his engineered statements, and once a single media outlet reproduced them, the more ‘respectable’ outlets were crowded out of the market. Trump’s statements were so calculated that the public literally couldn’t help but pay attention in the way that people can’t help but look at a wreck in the middle of the road. Some outlets tried to ‘ban’ Trump from their news because of this (such as The Young Turks), but they soon realized that Trump was now vital to their cash flow.
Trump has now revealed the face of a media that is fast becoming an unregulated market. Now, quality reporting is being hidden behind paywalls and buttressed by subscriptions, while the truly viral news is dangerously misleading, endlessly partisan, and sometimes downright fake (in the actual definition of the word).
Why this is all so horrifying is that such a system rewards people like Trump instead of punishing them with obscurity and ridicule. A truly free press, like a truly free market, is a market which is blind to such nebulous and high-minded ideals as ‘truth’ and ‘compassion’. If a buck can be made off of someone’s ignorance, that is a buck a free market will gladly extract. If a click can be earned off of a fake headline, then by thunder in a free press it will be.