Fascinating point made on Twitter today by Chris Hayes and echoed by Nate Silver.
During the campaign, Trump kept having all these awful things pop up – not just the “grab 'em by the pussy” tape, but his feud with a gold star family, Manafort stuff already, his miserable debate performances, his weird and erratic campaign spending…his crazy-ass rallies…
…but the biggest media in the country – NYT, Washington Post of course, but all the major city newspapers and obviously the news networks – are so geared to “fairness” doctrine, that every time there was a negative Trump story, they’d try to play fair and balance it with something negative about Clinton. But the biggest negative story on Clinton? The emails.
So as Trump flitted from bad news to bad news during the campaign each thing got reported on and then alongside it they ran the Clinton email story. And every time it was something new and negative about Trump, but it always seemed to be Clinton and emails because otherwise her campaign was fairly steady, at least by Clinton standards. And so none of the Trump stories really stuck for too long, because they kept getting replaced and churned out of the news cycle, while the emails were the go-to story on Clinton and just kept getting repeated over and over and over again…
That’s a great point. And combined with the networks’ inability to refrain from having pathological liars like Kelly Anne Conway constantly on the air, it really hammered it in.
Generally in politics you pick a scandal/flaw and hammer it. Clinton had one issue, Trump had like 300. So Clinton’s issue got hammered by Trump’s people AND the media, while Trump just made up new scandals literally every day and the whole thing was kept diffused.
The real story for Trump needed to be, “holy shit, we have never seen such an objectively terrible candidate.” That should have been the story every day.
The biggest media in the country – NYT, Washington Post of course, but all the major city newspapers and obviously the news networks – are so geared to “fairness” doctrine, that every time there was a negative Trump story, they’d try to play fair and balance it with something negative about Clinton.
Yes, they were trying to appear balanced more than be balanced.
To be real though, name another “politician” who would have survived almost any of the things Trump survived. I have to believe the media, like everyone else, thought Trump was a dead man walking. Why should they blow their ethics, their fairness, when no politician ever had survived those kind of stories.
Is fairness covering bad news in equal volume, or covering each one equally seriously?
How about framing, do you present their views as is, or from the framing of their opponent?
The media broadly decided that they needed to cover an equal volume of bad stories (in fact they covered more on Clinton), rather than cover each scandal with the same seriousness. They also decided to present Trump largely through framing of his own. See showing empty podiums of his press conferences to broadcast unedited while often failing to cover Clinton’s at all. Seriously the times they would show an empty Trump podium while Clinton was giving a speech were infuriating. And they would almost always cover Clinton’s positions with whatever Trump or GOP was saying about it. ‘Clinton proposes X, but is that actually (bad thing A,B,C)’
So if that is following their ethics and fairness, their ethics and fairness are broken. They fatally compromised them so as not to appear against trump when literally every day there seemed to be another ‘holy shit this guy is terrible’ story.
Yes, they were harder on Clinton. As a cite to that: the “liberal” New York Times spent twice as much space on Clinton’s (non-)scandals as Trump’s (very real ones):
What really made me sick is when they would show a live feed of his airplane sitting on the runway. For the kind of person who is a potential Trump voter, they see that and think “Wow, what a successful guy.”
That doesn’t make sense - if something had been leaked to Nunes, he surely would have informed everyone at the time. We know how much he hates leaks and anyone that would partake in it.
Q anon had claimed that there were multiple IG reports, so when only one was released, the Qultists decided that there must be more reports that were kept secret.
Last week they were claiming that a certain cement plant had child slave dungeons and were talking about attacking it. Who knows what it’ll be next week. It’s only a matter of time before someone gets killed.
