Because it is just easier to explain the rather shocking failure of the media with compendiums of very smart people’s writing on this rather than add my own 2 cents, I have to link to this well curated piece from Daily Kos.

The Media Fails and Fails Big Time

It includes links to Digby, Paul Krugman, Charles Pierce, James Fallows, etc., a murderer’s row of wordsmiths calling the media out.

Krugman:

True, there aren’t many efforts to pretend that Donald Trump is a paragon of honesty. But it’s hard to escape the impression that he’s being graded on a curve. If he manages to read from a TelePrompter without going off script, he’s being presidential. If he seems to suggest that he wouldn’t round up all 11 million undocumented immigrants right away, he’s moving into the mainstream. And many of his multiple scandals, like what appear to be clear payoffs to state attorneys general to back off investigating Trump University, get remarkably little attention.

Meanwhile, we have the presumption that anything Hillary Clinton does must be corrupt, most spectacularly illustrated by the increasingly bizarre coverage of the Clinton Foundation.

It cannot be overstated that we have a race between a candidate and a fraud and the media reports every allegation of smoke for the candidate as a fire and all of the fraud’s fire as smoke.  History will record this 2016 election as a close call when a crazy man nearly won the presidency, but it is entirely the media “normalization” of said crazy man that makes this campaign the most frustrating since Bush v. Gore.  Indeed, if Trump weren’t so repellent, if he were just a conventional Republican candidate, merely a horrible regressive with terrible policies, he’d probably get elected.

Attention must be paid.