Keller @ Large: Huffington Post Puts Trump In Entertainment Section
BOSTON (CBS) -- Donald Trump— serious candidate for president, or sideshow? One news outlet has made the decision.
The Huffington Post plans to only cover the real estate mogul as an entertainment story.
Sometimes it's hard to tell where the policy debate ends and the pop culture parade begins. And while it may raise a few eyebrows to see a presidential candidacy described as more entertainment than substance, it's not exactly a new phenomenon.
While some may think his candidacy is a joke, Trump is leading at least one GOP poll.
It's no surprise that a left-leaning website like the Huffington Post disdains Donald Trump's rhetoric. But their dismissal of trump as a "sideshow" raises a question: if they won't cover sideshows in their politics section, how did all those Bernie Sanders stories slip in?
Then again, their consignment of Trump to the entertainment section, well below the latest exciting news about Kim Kardashian, is really nothing new.
The "celebrification" of politics didn't begin with the Frank Sinatra/John F. Kennedy union, but it began to mushroom there.
And politics as entertainment really took off in the nineties, with Bill Clinton taking full advantage of an emerging trend: the growing importance of late-night talk shows and other pop culture venues in shaping voter attitudes, with a new generation of Kennedy leading the charge.
Showbiz and politics have always been inseparable; the national political conventions are nothing more than giant infomercials. But by 2008, the celebrity takeover was complete, from one side of the aisle to the other.
When it comes to getting attention from the vast majority of voters who otherwise are paying little or no attention to this race, Trump surely knows placement near Kim Kardashian crawling around like a lizard beats Bernie Sanders giving a speech, hands down.
