Finally, the mainstream media has acknowledged that they are biased when covering Donald Trump, but, of course, it’s all Trump’s fault, as the New York Times put it, for their lack of objectivity and balance in covering this presidential race. Vox writer Ezra Klein said “the media has felt increasingly free to cover Trump as an alien, dangerous, and dishonest phenomenon,” and that’s ok. (Keep in mind that as a Washington Post staffer, Klein organized a secret society of left-wing reporters to report biased stories; the group was later shut down after it was exposed.)
And then there’s Univision anchor Jorge Ramos, who put himself in a whole other morally superior league in an August 25 interview with Megan Kelly on The Kelly File. Ramos made the case that neutrality was not an option, and made a moral obligation rally cry to everyone, saying “ we’ll all be judged by how we responded to Donald Trump”. In other articles, like Time Magazine, Ramos has described Trump as “the most divisive, polarizing and disrupting figures in American politics in decades.” Ramos is famous for being thrown out of a press conference by Trump; while Ramos played the helpless victim role very well, the real story is that Ramos had been denied repeated interviews with Trump, and showed up at the press conference (which is his right, of course, as a journalist), but then proceeded to create quite a scene, which in BSR’s opinion, overstepped his bounds as a journalist. Oh, and there is the other little tidbit that his daughter Paola works for the Clinton campaign. Really, Jorge? Should you be lecturing all the rest of us?
There is a huge assumption among many journalists that Hillary Clinton is qualified. They give her a pass because she has been around (literally) forever, and the press feels she is vetted and therefore doesn’t need the relentless scrutiny they say Trump requires. The truth is that the American people feel that Hillary still needs much more vetting for things like her email practices and The Clinton Foundation pay to play scandal, but stories like this are overshadowed by the endless news cycle of Trump-bashing.
Unlike Hillary, Trump is unlike any candidate the media has ever seen. They don’t know what to do with him—he scares them. They totally misjudged Trump from the very beginning, painting him as a joke and a fly-by-night candidate. However, when he beat out 16 other candidates to win the Republican nomination, “many in the media admitted how wrong they had been, and that they had missed the magnitude of the anger and frustration that fueled Trump’s unlikely rise”, said Fox News analyst Howard Kurtz.
In an August 9 article, Kurtz went on to say that while Trump has definitely made his own mistakes, and he (Kurtz) is by no means defending Trump, he nevertheless fairly pointed out that Trump has been hit by a “tsunami” of negative coverage since the conventions, a move unprecedented in the media. Kurtz went on to give an example from liberal investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, who told Slate magazine that “the U.S. media is essentially 100 percent united, vehemently, against Trump, and preventing him from being elected president”—and Greenwald has no problem with that. Actually, we all should have a problem with that.
The key point here is that “different” does not equate to “abnormal”, and the Clinton/Trump race is increasingly being treated as a race between normal (Clinton) and abnormal (Trump). Clinton has been largely under reported or even ignored. CNN’s Chris Cuomo admitted long ago on-air, even before Hillary had officially stated she would run, that the media has given Hillary Clinton a “pass”. When asked this week to clarify his comments, Cuomo explained that what he really meant was that “the media wanted her in the race because it would be a better race to cover.” Wow. Cuomo went on to describe Trump as retaliatory to the press-“he’s going to make it hard for you afterwards” and Clinton as evasive “Clinton is going to make it very hard for you. Nobody ducks a question the way Clinton does.” Perhaps the best example of this from news conference-averse Hillary is her grossly misleading interpretation in the Fox News Sunday interview stating FBI Director Comey’s assessment of her answers to him regarding the private email server. With 7 in 10 Americans viewing her as untrustworthy and a liar (a higher number than Trump), Clinton should DEFINITELY have much more tough questioning from the press. But she doesn’t, and as the press would tell you, it’s all Trump’s fault. They have no responsibility or accountability whatsoever, it seems. Members of the mainstream media, you are living in a fantasy world if you think that attacking one candidate in a two-candidate race is what journalism is about.
