WHOEVER WINS, IT’S A LOSS FOR THE MEDIA
Either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is going to lose Nov. 8, but there’s another big loser in this ugly election — the mainstream media.
Polls show America’s trust of the media is plummeting. A new report reveals that hundreds of journalists contributed to the presidential campaigns, overwhelmingly to Clinton. Cybersleuths are uncovering unprecedented evidence of so-called respected journalists colluding with the Clinton campaign.
And Trump’s constant bashing of the press has exacerbated the distrust and dislike people already have toward the Fourth Estate.
Professor Thomas Patterson of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, called the media coverage of the presidential election “pretty weak.” During the early primaries, Patterson said, the press was “enthralled enough with Trump that they were almost in Trump’s pocket.” Trump dominated headlines everyday, Patterson said, and the other GOP candidates were just footnotes.
But coverage took a very different tone after Trump nabbed the nomination, Patterson said, and he generates the controversy the press likes. “To some degree,” Patterson said, “the press built him up and brought him down.
“The Republican Party really has been hurt by the media. No party should end up with a nominee that’s as handicapped at this point in the campaign as Trump is. Some of these revelations should have come out much, much earlier,” said Patterson, adding that his study shows coverage of Clinton has been negative from the start.
But last week, the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit investigative news organization, reported that hundreds of journalists, reporters, news anchors and television anchors have given more than $396,000 to the Clinton and Trump presidential campaigns — the lion’s share, more than 96 percent, to Clinton.
John Dunbar, CPI’s political editor, said there was a lot of pushback from reporters closer to covering the presidential race, who said the nonprofit was reporting on contributions from people who were “irrelevant — who don’t have anything to do with coverage.”
“I just find that to be really weak,” Dunbar said.
Journalism, Dunbar said, has been redefined. The Huffington Post, he noted, puts an editor’s note at the end of every Trump story that reads, “Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.”
“That’s mind-blowing. I don’t know how you can write about the guy and attach that note to everything that you write,” Dunbar said. “In our view, we just stick with the facts. At the end of the day, if you’re seen as biased, you have no credibility and you might as well be writing to the wind.”
“I don’t think anybody’s coming out smelling like roses after this election,” Dunbar said.
Patterson said journalism has had a “crisis of confidence before,” citing the McCarthy era and the yellow journalism of the early 1900s. “In each case,” Patterson said, “journalists went to the drawing board and thought about what they needed to do better.”