Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann excoriated the media Wednesday in a guest column at The Hollywood Reporter for refusing to treat Donald Trump with the disdain he has both earned and deserves.
According to Olbermann, the rationale behind this refusal is simple self-interest on the part of journalists who know that they can "ask any question about Trump, Trumpism or anti-Trumpism except the existential ones, because the existential ones could lead him to stop calling in to [their] morning show and providing [them] with [their] highest-rated hour for free."
After outlining the absurd inability of the press to question Trump when he blatantly and repeatedly contradicts himself on the record, he relented in his criticism somewhat, acknowledging that it's difficult to "examine what's going on inside of a man who could first pretend to be his own media spokesman, then boast about his own sexual conquests in the third person, then admit the deception to a reporter, then again admit it on the legal record, then deny it on national television, then when pressed about it by The Washington Post simply hang up the phone." As he noted:
With their own jobs hanging in the balance, who in the American media of 2016 could invoke not the politics of reproductive rights but question if there's something far more than inconsistency involved when a candidate says he believes women who have abortions should be in some way punished, then weeks later insists he meant they should punish themselves? Or in that environment, who can ask not about religious intolerance but instead what is amiss with the thought process of a candidate whose campaign pivoted from the fringes to a hateful lane in the mainstream the day he insisted Muslims be banned from entering this country, yet who could manage to later seriously claim all that was "just a suggestion"...
Shares