Extremism Experts Warn That The Media Is Failing America With Their Coverage Of Trump

There's no denying the fact that the nonstop media coverage of Donald Trump in 2016 helped land him in The White House, especially the fact that most outlets ran as many of his rallies, commercial free, as they could possibly handle. And now experts in extremism are warning that the media is making the same mistake by giving Trump lots of coverage, but not devoting enough time to the extreme rhetoric that he is using. Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.

There's no question about it, folks. The media in the year 2016 absolutely catapulted Donald Trump into his electoral college victory. Now, he lost the popular vote by 3 million votes, and let's never forget that, right? But it was the media coverage of Donald Trump treating him like a normal candidate, like he was just any other politician out there. But not just that, right? Because back in 2016, and I think the media's tapered off on this part a little bit. In 2016, every single time Trump held a rally, what would happen? CNN would cover it. Commercial free nonstop. Fox would cover it. M-S-N-B-C covered most of them. They gave Trump, according to reports, billions of dollars, I think about $4 billion worth of free airtime. He was allowed to just call in and do interviews, whereas all the other candidates had to show up in person, take time out of their schedule.

Trump could do it from his cell phone while on his plane. They gave Trump everything he wanted. But the most important thing was that they did it by treating him like a normal person. And now, according to a new report, extremism, experts across the country are warning that the media's doing the same thing again, we have a Republican at the top of the ticket, and granted, he's the former president, but they are still treating him like he is just like any other politician. Ignoring the fact that he recently suggested that General Mark Millie should be executed for treason, ignoring the fact that he is borrowing rhetoric from hi, uh, from Hitler, ignoring the fact that he has these horrific plans for these ideological screenings of immigrants in the United States. And when I say ignoring, I'm not saying they're not talking about it because they do talk about it, but as these extremism experts point out, they don't talk about it enough.

Let me read you this, because recently several experts spoke to salon.com, and here's what they had to say. If we don't call out the rhetoric as extreme, we risk making it normal and acceptable. That's according to Libby Hemphill, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Information in the Institute for Social Research. Those are the downstream risks of desensitizing. Again, focusing on the impacts these statements have, like increasing antisemitic behavior generally, or, or raising the temperature in the Middle East conflicts. It helps people understand why they're dangerous, who they impact, and why speech matters. Then of course, you have this from, uh, Donald ha hater Markel, a University of Kansas political Science professor who studies domestic extremism. Uh, he says, quote, the coverage is normalizing extreme positions on issues and failing to challenge the dehumanization of migrants and bad Jews that Trump paints his enemies when his dehumanizing comments are not challenged by the news media viewers go along. If the dehumanization sticks, it makes the support of political violence

Against enemies more likely. Media matters, of course, has also been compiling information, showing that when Trump makes these extreme comments, when you add up all the coverage together, usually it's two hours worth of coverage. So he can call for the execution of one of his former military advisors, you know, general Mark Millie. He can refer to everybody on the left as vermin and oh, it'll make headlines. They'll be talking about it, but they'll do, you know, four or five minutes here, four or five minutes there, you know, some shows won't talk about it at all. And then they move on. And while they're talking about that, according to media matters, he'll say other extreme things that then slip onto the radar. So we're not even able to call out all of his extremism, which only helps to normalize it. And listen, we can't sit here and be on the air 24 hours a day.