Businessman Donald Trump and the media have had a rocky relationship since he jumped into the presidential race nearly a year ago.
It reached a new level this week, when The Boston Globe's editorial page created a four-page fake newspaper based on his current political stances.
They predicted something The Globe opinion writers don't like - a Trump presidency. The fake headlines read "Deportations to Begin" and "Markets sink as trade war looms."
For his part, Trump was not amused.
“How about that stupid Boston Globe? It’s worthless. It sells for a dollar. Did you see that story? The whole front page, they made up the story that Trump is the president and they made up the whole front page,” he said earlier this week at an upstate New York campaign event.
"It’s a make-believe story, which is really no different than the whole paper."
Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies says the Globe’s editorial board made this unconventional move because Trump is unlike any other candidate that’s been covered in presidential politics. Some media watchers criticized the move as a stunt.
“Some people thought this was newspapers sinking to a new low, but there are a lot of other people – myself included – who think that’s brilliant. It got a lot of attention,” she said.
By using satire more akin to publications such as The Onion, or The Daily Show, McBride said the Globe was getting attention to what it sees as a serious issue.
“This is what editorial boards do,” she said. “They felt like they were not being heard, so they decided to join the 21st century, the era of ‘fake’ news and dummy up a fake newspaper about what it would be like if Trump were president. It got a lot of people thinking and talking.”
