Here are two different views of Donald Trump and the media’s coverage of his presidential campaign that caught my eye recently.

The first is a column that appeared in the Huffington Post in late January (“Epic Media Fail: How And Why Trump Trumped The Press“).

The author, Howard Fineman, quotes historian Doris Kearns Goodwin to support the idea that “journalism is giving Donald Trump a free pass.”

Every candidate is dealing with the same editorial and institutional trends: obsession with polls and conflict, the shorter attention spans of most news consumers and the ruthless aggregation, measurement and marketing of user interactions across scattered social media.

But no one uses these trends as cynically or successfully as Trump to avoid the scrutiny that only the media can provide and that the media, mesmerized, is not providing.

“Every day he is a new story, which is brilliant in its own right,” said Goodwin. “We see him in a debate, yelling at an opponent, or making fun of somebody or saying something outrageous.”

The focus on conflict rivets attention on the present. And by constantly jabbering about polls and his chances, Trump also throws the focus on the unknowable (but cheap for the media to speculate about) future of the campaign.

“It’s: ‘How is he going to do?,’” said Goodwin. “It’s: ‘How is this happening? Oh my God, he is leading! It’s possible he could win!’”

By dwelling on the glittering present and the entertainingly uncertain future, Trump erases all sense of history, context and accountability for his own life and actions.

What hasn’t been reported?

“Do we know, at this point, about his modus operandi in business? Do we know how he treated his staff? Do we know what kind of leader he was when he was building his business? I mean, I don’t know the answers to these things.

“All I know is that, when I see him now, it’s like his past is not being used by the media to tell us who the guy really is.”

Then there’s Juan Cole’s recent post (“How the US went Fascist: Mass media Makes excuses for Trump Voters“).

He writes, in part:

The Founding Fathers were afraid of the excitability of the voters and their vulnerability to the appeal of demagogues. That is the reason for a senate (which was originally appointed), intended to check those notorious hotheads in Congress, who are elected from districts every two years.

But it isn’t only the checks and balances in government that are necessary to keep the republic. It is the Fourth Estate, i.e. the press, it is the country’s leaders, and the general public who stand between the republic and the rise of a Mussolini.

And, as Cole sees it, the Fourth Estate has failed in its responsibilities.

But my old friend, Chuck Smith, formerly known as “Chuck Bollingmo,” has a very different take. Chuck went from publishing an underground newspaper at Lanai High School back at the end of the 1960s to being an influential financial blogger today (see his “Of Two Minds” blog).

In a recent blog post, Smith scores the corporate media for being clueless about its role in buttressing the existing power structure, using pretty harsh language in the process (“What the Pundits Don’t Get About Trump“).

What the blindered media pundits don’t grasp is their self-satisfied class of country-club Republicrats and ersatz we-feel-your-pain Demopublicans is the real enemy of progress, for what Trump supporters understand that the technocrat class of social climbers fails to grasp is the only way to progress from here is to tear down the institutions of privilege that the technocrat class defends and aspires to join.

This is why the media is as much the class enemy of the working class as the incestuous, corrupted and corrupting pool of swindlers, fakes, apparatchiks, lobbyist/brothel keepers and grifters that populate Washington, D.C.

Technocrat pundits scratch their well-educated heads and wonder why Trump enthusiasts would vote for a bombastic scion of wealth. Let me help you, gentle confused pundits: Trump comes across like a plumber who’s struck it rich: he’s got a beautiful (immigrant) wife (second, third or fourth, who’s counting, the guy has it made), he speaks his mind regardless of who’s offended, and he doesn’t bother with bean-counter trivialities like a carefully scripted agenda that includes all the key demographic groups.

Whew. Quite a range of views, but all agree on the basic premise that the media have not provided the news coverage that Americans need.