High alert

It’s normal for Bob Garfield to critique the press — he does it every week as co-host of public radio program “On the Media.”

But now, he’s upping the ante exponentially, delivering strong rebukes to reporters over the airwaves and in a column for losing sight of Donald Trump’s intrinsic flaws as the presumptive Republican nominee. You know — that pattern of xenophobia, racism and misogyny that should have put Trump’s candidacy on life support months ago, according to Garfield.

“It’s about slapping a somnolent media into realizing that the stakes are extremely high,” Garfield said this week. “It’s a rare moment in American history where someone so fundamentally anti-democracy is in position to vie for the presidency.”

Comments like that show how Garfield, at least on the subject of Trump, has leaped from press criticism to advocacy, or “agitation,” as he called it.

Trump’s list of pros and cons tips heavily toward the negative in Garfield’s eyes. That’s why’s he’s so upset that the media have largely stopped challenging Trump’s divisive, hateful record while instead engaging him about his tax returns and possible picks for vice president.

To Garfield, Trump’s ascendancy represents a national emergency, and journalists are asleep at the switch.

“Why has there been no media crusade to deny him the presidency? The press jumps to warn America about missing children, tainted meat and approaching dustings of snow?” Garfield wrote this week in Mediapost. “Why are we not on high fucking alert?”