As the Republican convention to formally declare Donald Trump as the party’s presidential nominee gets under way in Cleveland, Ohio, later today, experts are wondering what it might mean for the US media. “It could be …a defining moment in American media, especially for the TV networks,” writes a commentator in the New York Times. A moment when the media will either gleefully treat this as a typical Trumpian extravaganza guaranteed to bring in the ratings, or live up to their given role to provide truth and context to what is a “competition for the presidency of the United States in fraught and dangerous times”. Given the ratings-obsessed television media, though, Trump’s characteristic wild assertions are likely to have more play than sober fact-checking over the next four days.