Ban Trump From TV, Says Former CNN Host

Former CNN host and reporter Campbell Brown is asking her ex-colleagues in television to ban Donald Trump from the airwaves for a week in order to deny him a platform for his incendiary, racist rhetoric.

Brown, who now advocates for charter schools and other forms of school choice, argued in an op-ed for Politico Magazine on Friday that the television networks should forgo the short-term profits offered by Trump’s appearances for the sake of the greater social good.

Trump “is not a politician. He is not a leader,” Brown wrote. “He is a supreme narcissist, and you can deprive him of the one thing that keeps him going—airtime.”

She claimed that the move would not amount to censorship since Trump would still have YouTube at his disposal.

Brown has started a petition on Change.org asking the networks to ban Trump and coined the social media hashtag #TurnOffTrump to promote her efforts.

Her petition had just 97 supporters as of Saturday evening.

A narrower effort to change the media's coverage of Trump has gained more traction. Credo Action's Dec. 9 petition calling on MSNBC and CNN specifically to stop covering Trump disproportionately has over 176,000 signers as of Monday.

Brown’s proposal drew praise and cries of agreement on Twitter, but not everyone was supportive.

Jack Shafer, a media critic at Politico -- the same outlet that published Brown -- called the op-ed the “stupidest article” he had ever read.

This article has been updated with information about the Credo Action petition. 

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