title:  Dan Rather Delivers The Hard Truth About Trump And The Media
text: While few who know anything at all about the realities of the world support Donald Trump, and while media figures don t generally offer their support to Trump, they are completely complicit in the billionaire s rise, mostly because he makes them a lot of money. Dan Rather has been part of the media for a very long time, and what Rather is seeing this time is anything but democratic. What I worry about is, in a way, the media is a political partner, a business partner of Donald Trump,  Rather said on CNN s  Reliable Sources. The media wants the ratings,  he went on.  Trump delivers the ratings. In a way, they re business partners. I think there has been some media complicity in the rise of Trump. It s not the only factor, but it has been a factor of providing him so much airtime, and in some cases being complicit in arranging that airtime,  he said.Source: Huffington PostRather did offer a solution to the problem, and it s a pretty obvious one, but the media would have to ignore its ratings grab. The role of the journalist is to be an adversary, so I think the defense is, make an editorial judgment, make sure you offer the same to the other side,  he said.  I m not sure you want to have him live three times a day for an hour and a half at a time. Rather is right. Back in March, it was reported that Trump had had $2 billion in free advertising disguised as news stories. They often broke away from other candidates in favor of covering Trump rallies.To put that amount of money in perspective, it was widely reported last week that Hillary Clinton had nearly 40x the money that Trump s campaign had, but that, at $42 million, compared to Trump s $1.3 million, is still a drop in the bucket, compared to $2 billion in media coverage. The amount of money Clinton would need to raise to make up for that media deficit is virtually impossible.Featured image via Larry Busacca at Getty Images