By RODNEY HO/ rho@ajc.com, originally filed Monday, December 14, 2015
Campbell Brown, a CNN anchor from 2007 to 2010 who now writes about education, made a plea on Politico that is unlikely to be heeded: asking media outlets to place a one-week moratorium on Donald Trump coverage.
You may as well ask your kids to go a week without any electronic devices or request Trump to drop out of the race this week. It isn't going to happen. But here's part of her plea:
As many have already said, no presidential candidate in history has gotten this much free airtime. Let's stop being complicit in promoting his hateful and harmful demagoguery. Just for one week.
She said this isn't censorship because Trump could always use YouTube.
Brown understands the Trump appeal to TV news directors. He is "candy" for the cameras: "Every performance both repulses and compels, and no one looks away. No one ever looks away. And of course, the job of every TV anchor and reporter is partly trying to ensure no one ever looks away."
She knows that he's good for business and the bottom line. But to Brown, "the oversaturation is now doing real harm to our democracy, to national unity and to our sanity."
Brown doesn't see Trump as a political leader but a "supreme narcissist... You can deprive him of the one thing that keeps him going - airtime."
Her hashtag is #TurnOffTrump.
She is choosing to lay low and not do more publicity about it, as this Tweet notes:
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