This article that joins Hillary Clinton in blaming the media for her embarrassing loss in the 2016 election is, like many of the claims in Clinton’s book, so deeply delusional that, reading it, I think I must’ve been living in a parallel universe to the one the author describes.
The one and only point I’d agree upon is that the media feeds way too much off of sensationalistic clickbait. That’s where my agreement with the article ends, however. Yes, Clinton’s e-mail scandal, Clinton’s “coal miner” comments and her comments about “deplorables” got too much press, but at least they were things that happened recently and that potentially implicated serious political issues. What serious political issue was implicated by Trump’s dumb fratboy-style comments made during an Access Hollywood tape from back in 2005, before he was running for any political office? His were the kinds of comments I’ve heard from vulgar jocks and others in locker rooms all over the country. We already knew he was vulgar before the tape ever emerged. We already knew he was a womanizer. We already knew he was an entitled prick. What did we learn from the tape? What possible reason was there to flood the nation with non-stop news about this tape and a little parade of publicity-seeking women from the 1970s and 1980s or whenever who came out of the moldy woodwork to claim — gasp — that this rich, powerful, handsome real estate tycoon used to having women swoon over him back in decades when sexual mores were very bit different from today came on to them too aggressively? This “scandal” was little more than the mainstream media and the Establishment (almost successfully) trying to take Trump down because they saw he posed too much of a threat to their own entitled way of life, as I’d described at the time. All we heard from the media during the election, as far as Trump goes, was inarticulate cries of “racist,” “sexist,” fascist” and the like. There was very little discussion of serious issues, issues Trump had raised that were actually worthy of a serious discussion the scandal-sheet press was refusing to give us. I also wrote about this in detail back at the time.
To summarize what I’m saying above, the degree of media bias in favor of Hillary and against Trump was like nothing I had seen in my lifetime. (Incidentally, the media also majorly helped Hillary triumph over Bernie, whom I supported, by largely ignoring him until it had no choice and dubbing her the presumptive nominee.) It was really like Trump was running against the entire Establishment, as represented by Hillary, big corporations, big banks and, of course, corporate media. Once he won despite these overwhelming odds, the media’s hysterical calls for his impeachment began immediately, before he ever took office, and have not abated ever since. The media has not given him the benefit of any doubt, and it has, since then, fueled non-stop hysteria into this pointless “Russia” inquiry. I’ll eat my words if they uncover real collusion between Trump and Russia to swing the election, but if all Mueller comes up with after all the money, effort and hoopla sunk into this “investigation” is an “obstruction of justice” angle for Trump’s interference with Comey (who, as we’ve now heard, was pretty much acting as a political hack who’d come to a preconceived conclusion that he wouldn’t charge Clinton for the e-mail scandal before interviewing key witnesses — including her — and before concluding the investigation), then all we’ll be seeing here is the makings of a coup d’état by the same corporate and media Establishment that had fought Trump tooth and claw all along.
And here I come to the single most absurd point this article makes:
Ninth, journalism failed — and still fails — to fully recognize and report on the racial and sexual politics at the heart of Trump’s victory and his so-called administration.
Are you kidding me?? All the media does nowadays is report on alleged racism, sexism, Islamophobia, homophobia and other identity politics. It does so for precisely the reason that such sensationalized coverage creates controversy and drives ratings, sales, ad revenue, clickbait, etc. With regard to Trump in particular, the media floods us with a daily stream of non-stop accusations of racism, sexism, Islamophobia and the like. The media’s response to Charlottesville, for instance, was completely out of touch with most of America and also completely hysterical. Somewhat appallingly, the article cites that bare-faced racist Ta-Nehisi Coates’ recent piece suggesting that Trump won because of long-standing white supremacy. I discuss in great detail here, including documenting assertions with facts, exactly why Coates is wrong and why, in reality, anti-white racists like him are to blame for Trump’s victory. Finally, and more generally, the media’s sensationalistic coverage of race issues has spawned an erroneous belief, repeatedly discredited by actual data, that there is some sort of epidemic of unjustified police shootings of blacks going on. Such coverage, and the media’s general coverage of race issues, has inflamed racial tensions and led directly to an upsurge in divisive, harmful identity politics by both blacks and whites on both the left and the right.
So while we can both agree that the media is way too driven by ratings and controversy and not enough by actual substantive political issues, I think, as the poll in the graphic above illustrates, most Americans would agree with me rather than with this article about the political direction in which that favoring of sensationalistic coverage is biasing the media … which is all to say that the author needs to get a better grasp on reality before plunging into full-throated defenses of the message of Hillary’s everyone-else-is-to-blame-for-my-election-failure book that seeks, like the rest of her Wall St./Saudi oil- funded political career, to profit at our expense.
