Since early in the primary season, I’ve been wondering where the articles were criticizing Trump for his innumerable bad deeds in business dealings.  Sure, there was a rather gentle New York Times article back in January describing his travails with the Plaza Hotel.  But there was precious little besides this, and yet a man of his volatile temperament, callous greed, and obvious bullying personality surely had much worse waiting to be uncovered.

My guess back in January was that the Times was simply setting the predicate for the rest of the mainstream media, suggesting that Trump might have had some serious flaws as a candidate but that the rest of the MSM was continuing its research and holding its fire until Trump actually won the nomination.  At such time, I expected the MSM to unleash Hell.

And so it has begun.  Early in June, The New Yorker wrote a scathing article about Trump U.  Not to be outdone, Politico produced an article weeks later claiming that Trump U is really a racketeering scheme.  A bit later in the same month, the LA Times wrote about how Trump is suing restaurateurs who claim that Trump’s anti-Mexican rhetoric is cause for breaking contracts to work in his new D.C. hotel.   And the Washington Post has come forth with a devastating article about Trump’s lone public company venture, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts – whose ticker symbol was, of course, Trump’s initials, DJT – and how it bailed him out from personal financial ruin at the expense of countless individual shareholders.  The guns of the MSM are now thundering in full throat, trained on the presumptive GOP nominee, Donald Trump.

The first and the last of these articles are puzzling because they are not really news.  They are simply rehashes of facts long on the public record, long known to denizens of the Donald’s hometown, the Big Apple.  Those denizens would include Roger Ailes and most of his minions at Fox News.

So why is it, then, that none of this information was brought to Fox News’s loyal audience before and during the critical primary season – people who had few other outlets on whom they could rely for news that was, if not “fair and balanced,” at least balancing the MSM narrative?  Why did Fox News not see fit to bring this information to its viewers, even when Trump was neither a Republican loyalist nor a conservative?

The obvious motive would be simply the desire for profits, or greed, as it’s called on the left.  Trump was a phenomenon in the debates, great for ratings and profits.  His insult of Megyn Kelly only increased his appeal to viewers.

But let’s not jump to conclusions.  Let’s ask Ailes and his subordinates: why did they not provide even a modicum of research on Trump and his past business dealings?  Why did they allow a man with so many obvious flaws to go un-researched and unchallenged by their network, while giving him so much free air time on so many of their programs and garnering such high ratings on so many debates in which he held court from center stage?  Why did Fox “set out to convince its viewers that Trump is a legitimate candidate”?  Why did Ailes and Fox News not provide important facts to its national audience about Trump that were so well known publicly in their home news market?

Was it just greed?  If so, weren’t Ailes and Fox News utterly derelict in their duty to their viewers and the voters?  And will they not be responsible for the collapse of the Republican Party and the restoration of the Clinton regency?