BOB GARFIELD:  This is On the Media. I’m Bob Garfield. For the rest of the hour, we’re going to be looking into the complex, turbulent and utterly codependent relationship between Donald Trump and the media. You probably already know how Trump feels about us but in case you’ve forgotten –

  [CLIPS]:

DONALD TRUMP:  Look, the media - you know my opinion of the media. It's very low. I think the media is, frankly, made up of people that, in many cases - not in all cases - are not good people.

DONALD TRUMP:  The press should be ashamed of themselves…

DONALD TRUMP:  Like this sleazy guy right over here, from ABC. He’s a sleaze in my book.

ABC REPORTER TOM LLAMAS:  Why am I a sleaze?
DONALD TRUMP:  You’re a sleaze because you d - you know the facts and you know the facts well.

DONALD TRUMP:   I’m gonna continue to attack the press. Look, I find the press to be extremely dishonest. I find the political press to be unbelievably dishonest. I will say that.

  [END CLIP]

BOB GARFIELD:  Well, that’s a fine how-do-you-do, from a man who has built his insurgent campaign entirely on the backs of the media, who have for a year dutifully reported everything that has come out of his mouth. The question is, how should we be dealing with him? I personally have agitated for an aggressive confrontational approach of the sort that modern press traditionally avoids.

So now we explore what, if anything, should change when a candidate, such as Trump, is just one November Tuesday away from the presidency of the United States. First, we speak to Paul Waldman, senior writer for The American Prospect and a blogger for The Washington Post, who says he's been worried about the media's impotence through most of the election season but that a Trump press conference this week might herald a turning point.

PAUL WALDMAN:  In some ways, it was something that we've seen before, where he came out and criticized reporters, he called one reporter a sleaze, he said they’re all dishonest. But what prompted it was simply reporters doing what reporters are supposed to do, which is that there was a story that had some questions that were outstanding about what happened at this fundraiser, where did the money go and did Trump actually make the $1 million donation that he had claimed?

And a group of reporters, particularly David Fahrenthold from The Washington Post, but some others as well, started to investigate this, and they did some shoe leather work. And what they found was that the money didn't seem to have been distributed. That, obviously, enraged Trump, but I think that what was really important about that was that when he attacked their professionalism for doing what was an excellent job, I think that caused some reflection on the part of the press to say that the best way to handle him is to just do the things that we’re supposed to be doing and not just kind of sit back and say, wow, isn't this a crazy campaign, which is what the tone of a lot of the coverage was up until then.

BOB GARFIELD:  There are a few other developments of the week. One was that CNN started in its Chyron, the crawl across the screen that the cable channels use to create the illusion of urgency, would both quote Trump and then truth squad him at the same time, in parenthesis, and say, this doesn't check out or this isn’t true. The New York Times had a story by Adam Liptak, raising serious questions about Trump and the rule of law, based on his public utterances and the Judge Curiel thing, which did seem finally to hold his feet to the fire.

PAUL WALDMAN:  The interview that Jake Tapper did with him on the question of whether it was racist for him to attack Judge Curiel for not giving him all the rulings that he wants, that was different from what we ordinarily see, in an important way. Usually, when journalists get a chance to interview a candidate they have a whole bunch of questions that they want to get to and if the candidate dodges the question, they might follow up once or twice but then they’ll just move on. What Tapper did was he just stuck to that one question and kept asking it over and over and over, until he got the kind of clarity that he thought was important. And it turned out to be a great move because it got all kinds of attention and it really emphasized the fact that Trump was, indeed, making a blatantly racist attack on this judge.

BOB GARFIELD:  That interview may well have been a turning point but, at the same time, to me, it was also kind of part of the problem, which is that Jake, for all his persistence, asked, asked, asked but never charged, charged, charged, even though there were a whole bunch of manifest facts at his disposal. What is it about the press that makes us refuse, even with tons of evidence, to be in any way prosecutorial?

PAUL WALDMAN:  It's a quandary for reporters because they're not, in their news reporting, supposed to be taking positions, even with someone like Donald Trump. And so, the idea is that you can arrive at the same place by asking the right questions and probing in the right way, without coming out so far as to slam your fist down on the table and saying, you sir, are a racist. I think that the belief the reporters have is if they cross that line into what seems like advocacy, then they’re gonna lose credibility and they’re not gonna be able to persuade large portions of their readership or their viewership who don’t already agree with them.

BOB GARFIELD:  Now, as you may know, I have been arguing quite strenuously to whoever will listen, including on this show, that at this stage the press should take on a role of advocacy. And yet, if you’re right, we have reached a turning point where just plain shoe leather journalism is beginning to have an impact. Does this mean that I should have just kept my trap shut and let journalism and politics take their course?

PAUL WALDMAN:  I guess my question is, what would the kind of journalism that you're advocating look like, in a real specific way? Does it mean that you would have news stories on the front page of The New York Times or The Washington Post saying, Donald Trump (comma), who is a liar and a charlatan, today gave a speech in Cincinnati where he said X, Y and Z?

Conservatives have for decades told their people that you shouldn't believe anything that the mainstream media tell you because it's all saturated with liberal bias and if, if it's not coming from Fox or from Rush Limbaugh or from a source that you, as a conservative, can trust implicitly, then it's nothing but a pack of lies. If journalists, I think, were upfront about those kind of judgments, even people who weren’t necessarily conservative could look at that and say, what the Republicans have been saying about the media really is true; they really are just a bunch of liberals trying to infect us with their bias, and I might as well discount whatever they have to tell me about what happened today.

BOB GARFIELD:  Elsewhere on this program, we’re going to hear novelist Aleksandar Hemon say, why draw the line at Trump, that Trumpism is really just the logical extension of political rhetoric that has been brewing now for 30 years, so why choose him to draw a line in the sand? Is this a time? Is this a historical emergency that should make us rethink journalistic convention?

PAUL WALDMAN:  To be honest, I'm not sure I - I've decided yet what the answer is. You can argue, on one hand, that he is not really all that different from things that other Republicans have done. He is just kind of strips away the veneer and, you know, puts them right in your face. On the other hand, you can argue that he is something qualitatively different, that he represents a kind of crypto fascist approach that is uniquely dangerous. I go back and forth on that question on a [LAUGHS] day-to-day basis, for instance, the way that a lot of cable news has covered Trump, which is basically to just set up a camera at his rallies, let him go for an hour and then afterward have a bunch of people sit around and say, wow, that was crazy. LAUGHS]

Is, is that enough? You know, you could even argue that Trump is gonna dig his own grave this way and that even as he has been successful in appealing to people in his party enough to get the nomination that, at the same time, he's alienating so many other people that it's not even necessary for reporters to, you know, bash people over the head with the idea that it's really, really bad. So sorry I don't a more definitive answer.

BOB GARFIELD:  You're not quite saying, just let the cameras roll and you’re not saying, I'm with you, Bob, let's throw everything we have against this guy. You seem to be advocating some sort of middle ground, grounded in your belief that journalism, when left to do what it does, will be all that's needed.

PAUL WALDMAN:  Yeah, that's what I would like to believe. If Trump was running a scam on people with Trump University, then just investigating it and getting all the facts and putting them in front of people, that should be the most powerful indictment, if it, indeed, was a scam. And the same thing is true, you know, of his policy plans. If they’re crazy, if the reporters who are trying to objectively re - report the story, if they are laying out all those facts, then they’re gonna provide all the raw materials that anyone would need to create the indictment. And so, it might not be necessary for them to be as prosecutorial, and you’d end up in the same place at the end. That’s what I would hope, anyway.

BOB GARFIELD:  Paul, thank you.

PAUL WALDMAN:  My pleasure.

BOB GARFIELD:  Paul Waldman is a senior writer for The American Prospect and blogger for The Washington Post.