#261 / Rickrolled Again

According to The Hill, "journalists lashed out at Donald Trump on Friday after the GOP presidential nominee used his 'major announcement' to get more than 25 minutes of free airtime on major cable news networks."

Click right here to read the story in The Hill. Here is an excerpt from the article: 

Media figures offered harsh criticism for the event. 

"We got played, again, by the Trump campaign, because that's what they do...," CNN's John King said.  

"We all got Rickrolled and played," lamented CNN's Jake Tapper, referring to a popular bait-and-switch internet meme.

If you are not exactly clear about what it means to be "Rickrolled," you can read about that phenomenon in this Wikipedia article. Again, here's an edited excerpt, outlining how the scheme works:

Rickrolling, alternatively rick-rolling, is a prank and an Internet meme involving an unexpected appearance of the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song "Never Gonna Give You Up." The meme is a type of bait and switch using a disguised hyperlink. Those led to the music video [believed] that they were accessing some unrelated material, [and were] said to have been rickrolled [when the "Never Gonna Give You Up" video appeared instead of the material they expected].

"Rickrolling," it seems to me, is an apt description of the entire Donald Trump for President campaign. What you, as a voter, might think you're going to get, by way of results, when you pull the lever for Trump, is almost certainly not what you are actually going to experience. 

And as for the media folks who keep falling for the Trump Rickroll stunt, I agree with this commentary from Alternet that a kind of continuing "media malpractice" is at work. So, just forget about your post-event outrage and stop covering this dissembling fraud!