A newspaper publisher who excoriated GOP front-runner Donald Trump this week in an editorial says television news is to blame for thrusting the casino tycoon to the front of the polls.
Joseph McQuaid, publisher of the right-leaning New Hampshire Union-Leader, accused cable and network television Tuesday of dedicating an unreasonable amount of coverage to Trump’s presidential campaign.
The problem with the all the time spent on Trump, he explained in a CNN interview, is that it comes at the expense of more suitable 2016 candidates. By talking endlessly about Trump, and by focusing on him more than any other presidential candidate, the current front-runner gets name recognition, and decent polling numbers, McQuaid explained.
The networks then use polling numbers to decide who gets to participate in the GOP primary debates, he said. But if a candidate only polls well because of media coverage, then television’s obsession with Trump has effectively boxed out better 2016 candidates.
“The news media, the networks, yours included, have elevated these national polls to [something] more important than they should have been and should be,” McQuaid said.
He then took aim at Fox News, CNN, and the Fox Business Network for using national polling numbers to decide who gets to participate in the main GOP primary debates.
“[C]redible candidates don’t get a chance to be heard in the states which are going to do the voting because the national networks won’t let them on primetime,” he said.
“So, of course, you are going to get certain bubbles for certain candidates. The national poll is going to show Trump ahead, because he has got the name recognition. He is a TV brand. He is, in part, a creature of the national television networks.”
When it comes to media coverage of Trump, McQuaid isn’t wrong.
The major networks, including ABC, CBS and NBC News, and cable television have dedicated an enormous amount of time and energy to covering the Trump campaign, more than any other 2016 candidate.
So much time has been spent on covering the billionaire businessman, in fact, that the GOP front-runner openly boasts that he has spent virtually nothing on advertising. Television has that covered, and it costs him nothing.
Trump and McQuaid are currently engaged in a war of words following the New Hampshire Union-Leader’s publication of a editorial comparing the GOP front-runner to Biff Tannen, the villain from “Back to the Future.”
“So this guy, his name is Joe McQuaid,” Trump said to an audience this week, “he is a lowlife. I’m telling you. I watched this guy. Honestly, he is a loser. You have a very dishonest newspaper — newspaper and a failing it is going down the tubes.”
