4 creative solutions to the media's Donald Trump problem

Don't believe Donald Trump when he tells you he despises the press. The news media has given Trump a hugely successful (and inexpensive) campaign platform. And Trump has long been a master at getting the news media to talk about him. His repentant Art of the Deal ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, told The New Yorker in July that when he met the real estate mogul in 1985, Trump "was obsessed with publicity, and he didn't care what you wrote." In fact, Trump apparently offered the book deal to Schwartz because he liked a negative profile Schwartz had written on him for New York magazine.

And let's face it: The news media, as a business, also loves Donald Trump, even if individual reporters and editors are skeptical of him as a candidate and potential president.

But these days, the Republican presidential nominee has been getting a lot of unusually bad press, and that is putting the media in an uncomfortable place. On the one hand, the press is downright allergic to appearing biased. But on the other hand, the news media has a very strong collective bias toward accurate and verifiable reality — given institutional reputations and libel laws, you might call it an existential imperative — and so news organizations are reacting to Trump's persistent disregard for easily substantiated facts by, for example, fact-checking him on live TV, while Trump is speaking.

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Meanwhile, Trump has already blacklisted The Washington Post, Politico, BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, and other news organizations from campaign events due to what he perceived as unfair or inaccurate coverage. He rails against the "corrupt" and "rigged" media with gusto, and many of his supporters agree. With more than two months left until Election Day, and no signs of Trump becoming any less unpredictable, what's a news media to do?

Here are four outside-the-box tactics news organizations and TV networks might consider to deal with a most idiosyncratic presidential candidate.

1. Hand the campaign coverage to robots

Reporters and editors are biased — because humans have biases. If journalists can't check their own prejudices and preconceptions enough to cover Trump dispassionately, hand the job over to artificial intelligence. Computer programs already write some news stories, mostly relating to sports and business, but it wouldn't take a quantum leap in AI technology to have a computer transcribe Trump's speeches, compare them to previous speeches, and pull out anything new. The programs could even be instructed to fact-check Trump, though without any annoying journalist attitude.

This would be a big experiment to drop in the middle of a hard-fought presidential campaign, and a dangerous one for journalists, but Trump frequently accuses the media of bias and "rigging" the election against him, and it's a lot harder to make a case that a computer is out to get you.

2. Send theater critics to cover Trump rallies

Trump has delivered a handful of scripted policy speeches, and news organizations should of course send political reporters or tailored policy experts to cover and analyze those events. But most of Trump's rallies might be better described as political theater. Showmanship and ability to read a friendly audience are Trump's real strengths as a candidate, and maybe the news media should respect those. As such, it might be more honest and illuminating to send a professional movie or theater critic to grade Trump's rallies — both the candidate on stage and the performance of the audience. Trump's policies are mostly too vague to judge on their merits, but his improv skills are exceptional. Can't The New York Times spare Ben Brantley for a few weeks?

3. Cover only Trump's policy proposals

The fun of Trump's presidential campaign is the aura of improvisation, the anything-can-happen quality the permeates his whimsical Trump-centric operation. Both campaigns — Trump's and Hillary Clinton's — seem perfectly happy with this pay-for-airplay arrangement between Trump and the news media, but it's arguably a disservice to the body politic, an unhealthy sugar rush for the electorate. One antidote is for the media to do what Trump says he wants: Take him seriously. Ignore the bread and circuses, and report only on any policy Trump or his team proposes.

"At some point, I'm going to be so presidential that you people will be so bored, and I'll come back as a presidential person, and instead of 10,000 people, I'll have about 150 people," Trump said at a rally in April. "And they'll say, 'Boy. He really looks presidential.'" He added at the time, "I just don't know that I want to do it quite yet." Reporting and analyzing only what Trump proposes to do as president — not his jabs and gibes and jokes and jeers — might focus the electorate, and maybe even the Trump campaign.

4. Give the people what they want

What could be more in the spirit of democracy than letting the people, not editors, decide what stories get prominent placement on news sites? Online media encourages this — the more people click on stories about a certain subject, the more likely news organizations will write more stories on that subject. But this still leaves editors a lot of discretion. Facebook gives people what they want to read, according to Facebook's mysterious algorithms, with very little curation.

In this case, several reporters at each organization could write competing stories about the same Trump event, with different headlines, and let "We the People" decide what's newsworthy. This can backfire, as Facebook found out over the weekend when it promoted a fake story about Megyn Kelly being fired from Fox News in its "Trending" section. But if the people prove they want to read about Donald Trump proposing to deport illegal immigrants to a moon colony, well, you can't blame media bias.