LA Times - "Donald Trump's media obsession led him to hire the head of a far-right news site."

[TomCADem]

What is Trump does not represent the high water mark of RW racial extremism, but the beginning of the normalization of such rhetoric? If Hillary wins, I think that GOP's lurch to the far right will continue through the 2018 midterms with openly racist Republicans dominating the GOP primaries.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-media-20160820-snap-story.html

It seemed bizarre. But Donald Trump’s choice this week of a renegade, far-right news executive to lead his campaign was an inevitable culmination of a candidate’s war with the mainstream media and his embrace of his party’s most incendiary voices.

Trump’s obsession with the media has been one of the few constants in his campaign. He rails against “scum” reporters, withholding credentials from major news organizations and lashing out on Twitter this week against the “failing New York Times,” while granting lengthy interviews to those same outlets and basking in their attention. He exploits the divide in conservative media to bash enemies and create safe zones on select television and radio shows. He questions the core tenets of the 1st Amendment and flouts the judgment of fact-checkers with abandon.

The union of conservative media’s edgiest elements with the party’s standard-bearer has been years in the making, fomented by the establishment media’s loss of dominance and credibility. Trump, who has spent years learning how to navigate and dominate the news, has stepped into that credibility void to push once-fringe ideas into mainstream conversation like no other candidate.

“You have all these websites that create this echo chamber — that’s kind of an old term,” said Charlie Sykes, a conservative radio host in Wisconsin. “It’s gone beyond an echo chamber” to competing realities.