I'm not on board with the theory that the media bears responsibility for the rise of Donald Trump because they have so incessantly covered him. A very rich but patently insane person running for the presidency of the United States is a Big News Story. There's no way to pretend it's not, not from the first escalator descent onward. A candidate vowing to deport every last undocumented American resident without recourse, millions and millions of them, is a huge story. The hyper-xenophobic, hyper-obstructionist, shutdown-happy meltdown of the Republican Party has been covered not a damn bit by "the media" over the last decade, and if it takes a circus clown immolating himself in the middle of the cable news expressway to make that story television friendly then so be it.
Donald Trump has brought that story front and center, and watching every both-sides-do-it wag in punditry grapple with how to tell the story of the virulent no-nothing xenophobe becoming a huge hit with conservative voters while still struggling mightily to dodge all the unpleasant ways this reflects on the movement and voters that have elevated him to front-runner status is, at least, informative.
This does not mean, however, that the media needs to genuflect to Trump over demands that would have the op-ed pages in full riot if some other candidate tried it. Donald Trump may be fine deporting eleven million people, for example, but he draws the line at allowing television shots of his unique, load-bearing combover—so the networks obligingly agree during his rallies to not show the side of his head.
Two network sources also confirmed the unprecedented control the television networks have surrendered to Trump in a series of private negotiations, allowing him to dictate specific details about placement of cameras at his event, to ensure coverage consists primarily of a single shot of his face.
The side effects of this, incidentally, are that you will rarely, if ever, see reaction shots of Trump's crowd. He may lead the crowd in a rowdy chorus of raise-your-right-hand-and-pledge-yourself-to-me, but you'll only see the back of the crowd's heads. Ditto for unrest in the crowd, which if it can't be seen from the central camera pen can't be seen at all.
When Trump complains that the media does not “turn the cameras” to show the size of his crowds, it’s because, unless they turn or zoom out the head on camera, there is no separate angle to show the crowd.
Then of course there's Trump's ever-willingness to do media interviews. It is his favorite thing, and is candy to news programmers looking to fill time or perhaps be the outlet for the latest outrageous proclamation. And if his terms are that you be nice to him or you're out of his media club, then you can either do your damn job and feel good about yourself or bend to his will and be the recipient of weeks of near hate-speech from the walking septic tank.
“It’s the Megyn Kelly effect,” said one MSNBC producer. “If you push back too hard, it will only hurt you. It’s only going to hurt your show, your brand, your image, because for some reason, Donald Trump is more impervious to these attacks than a typical politician.”
There's a difference between covering Donald Trump as news and being merely an accessory to his own campaign staff, and if you're constrained from asking tough questions of Trump because he says he won't come on your network if you do, I think we all can glean which side of that line you're on.
There's a notable difference here between print media and the cable networks. Trump has been getting negative coverage in print pieces, and the editorial pages have been positively blistering toward him. It's the television crews that have been utterly cowed. They are in it for the footage, the cheap, easy footage of the angry man yelling, and are so terrified of not being able to show it that each network has largely abandoned asking pointed questions about what any of it means.
This is not, however, a new approach wheeled out just for Donald Trump. This is because they are decaying piles of newsless garbage on the best of days. Trump merely knows how to push their buttons to his maximal advantage because, coming from the ranks of cheaply produced reality television himself, he knows exactly how desperate they are for what he's selling, and he knows how much he can ask for it in return.