CNN staffers gave their boss an earful about the obnoxious, never-ending Donald Trump coverage earlier this week, and rightly so.

At a network town hall event Thursday, staffers complained about the excessive coverage of Donald Trump as well as CNN President Jeff Zucker’s directive to cover the presidential candidate ad nauseam, The Wrap’s Jordan Chariton reports.

Anyone who’s tuned in to CNN lately will know what the staff is upset about. The network airs Trump rallies and press conferences in full -- regardless of their news value -- and continues to dedicate precious airtime to segments about Trump’s hair or his latest Twitter outburst.
In a shocking display of the channel’s priorities, CNN even bumped Anderson Cooper’s moving special about Hurricane Katrina for a Trump press conference in which nothing happened.

As John Sides at The Washington Post has pointed out, the media's obsessive coverage of the reality TV star is precisely the reason he has risen in the polls.

“It’s tempting to think that each surge is somehow the result of each candidate’s idiosyncratic appeal to Republican voters,” Sides writes. “But a simpler explanation is this: when a pollster interrupts people’s lives and asks them about a presidential primary that doesn’t formally begin for months, a significant number of people will mention whichever candidate happens to be in the news these days.”

CNN has basically provided Trump with hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, of free advertising.

And so has Fox News, and so has MSNBC, and so has every other news station that decides they're going to follow him around to see what new outrageous and awful thing he will say that day.

This is election coverage as reality TV. Is there anything that has destroyed serious news more than reality TV?