Trump vs. The Media by Mollie Ziegler Hemingway

Author:Mollie Ziegler Hemingway [Hemingway, Mollie Ziegler]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Media & Internet, Public Affairs & Administration, Political Science, Political Process, Politics
ISBN: 9781594039775
Google: CaCYDgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 34648492
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2017-04-25T00:00:00+00:00

The media felt empowered to take sides because it thought it had the power to determine who is on the right side of history. Voters had other ideas.

And yet, they had dropped their journalistic standards as they tried to elect Clinton, justifying the departure from even a pretense of objectivity on the grounds that Trump was dangerous, and they had lost. Their team had lost. And it was increasingly clear that Democrats were their team.

TEAM DEMOCRAT

The 2016 campaign featured the unauthorized release of e-mails from Democratic officials and Hillary Clinton campaign operatives via WikiLeaks, a group that publishes private or classified information from anonymous sources. The leak revealed details about how these officials interacted with the media, including journalists at CNN, POLITICO, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. This included information about a Democratic operative and former CNN contributor, Donna Brazile, repeatedly leaking debate questions that would be featured in a debate hosted by CNN to Hillary Clinton; a POLITICO reporter running the text of stories by Clinton operatives before publishing them; and a New York Times reporter allowing the Clinton campaign to nix an unflattering quote from an interview, contravening the newspaper’s official policy forbidding quote approval.

The information once again confirmed the view of many Republicans that the media was at times behaving as the communications arm of the Democratic Party.

There can be little doubt that the media worked hand in glove with the Clinton campaign. A good example of how close the relationship worked took place with the media coverage of efforts to highlight Clinton’s support from beauty pageant winner Alicia Machado.

At the end of the first presidential debate of 2016, Hillary Clinton shoehorned in a reference to the former beauty contestant who had won a contest run by Trump in 1997.

Trying to show Trump’s misogyny, which was another major campaign theme of hers, she said, “And one of the worst things he said was about a woman in a beauty contest. He loves beauty contests, supporting them and hanging around them. And he called this woman ‘Miss Piggy.’ Then he called her ‘Miss Housekeeping,’ because she was Latina. Donald, she has a name … Her name is Alicia Machado … And she has become a U.S. citizen, and you can bet she’s going to vote this November.”

All is fair in politics, and if Hillary Clinton wanted to run a “war on women” campaign attack against Donald Trump, it would just mean she was following in the footsteps of previous Democratic candidates. Almost immediately, media outlets ran detailed, if thinly sourced and one-sided, front-page and top-of-the-newscast stories, some including previously taken photo shoots of Machado with an American flag. That meant these stories and photos were ready to go and waiting for Clinton to sound the alarm by mentioning her name. There was no daylight between actual Hillary Clinton campaign talking points and the stories that ran on front pages across the land.

Note how differently media outlets covered the story when it first broke in 1997.

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