Not surprisingly, he's good for ratings:
A single poll has seemingly catapulted him from celebrity status to presidential threat. Journalists are poll junkies, and nothing gets their adrenaline pumping like fresh numbers—especially if someone famous is involved.
So when Thursday’s NBC/Wall Street Journal survey had The Donald in second place among Republicans—at 17 percent, tied with Mike Huckabee and four points behind Mitt Romney—he crossed some invisible threshold, from impossible to plausible.
Except I think most of my fellow pundits know better. That number reflects name recognition for a zillionaire playboy. It may also reflect a general sense that Trump is a take-charge businessman who would know something about fixing the economy.
But most of all, it reflects Trump’s recent television blitz—where he has talked far less about his business acumen than about Barack Obama’s birth certificate, again and again. And the media just keep giving him a platform for this nonsense because Trump is good box office. He boosts the ratings. And there’s a sense that birther conspiracy theories are hot-button stuff, even if they are, inconveniently, disproved by the facts.
