Media bias: Clinton, not Trump, is the focus of deplorable treatment. Menon,
For the last 72 hours, the U.S. media has scrutinized Hillary Clinton’s words and health with a sickening double standard.
“Will she reveal her full medical records?” CNN wondered on Monday, in between an ominous graphic titled, “Clinton’s Health Timeline” and grainy footage of the candidate “stumbling” into a van outside a Sept. 11 memorial in New York.
Clinton has pneumonia, her campaign and physician explained. She was feeling overheated and dehydrated. Her illness can be treated with antibiotics.
But media reaction to this lung inflammation — “Clinton camp doesn’t reveal pneumonia until video,” read another conspiratorial CNN graphic on Monday — suggests there is no cure for the chronic suspicion, hostility and outright unfairness Clinton continues to endure inside this election’s funhouse of false equivalence.
Yes, she is the victim of media bias, not Donald Trump, as he loves to claim.
He is graded on a curve. She is assumed to be cheating on her tests. He has no time for the curriculum. She has spent her life borrowing books and doing extra homework. He spends the day hurling insults from the back of the class. She sits quietly in the front row, trying to stay on topic.
This is why Trump continues to get a passing grade even after earning nothing but Fs. The expectations are so low, the media is just glad when he isn’t spray-painting vulgarities on their backpacks or showing up for homeroom with a stink bomb.
Consider another story now in heavy rotation on the cable news channels.
At 11:23 a.m. on Monday, CNN switched from Clinton’s health to convene a panel discussion about her speech at a Friday fundraiser. The take-away line for CNN and many other outlets was when Clin- ton told her audience: “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.”
Almost instantly, those last three words exploded into a tempest as scolding pundits recoiled to their fainting chairs and speculated on the buckshot damage she had just inflicted on her foot.
“Why alienate half the country?” they wondered.
“How will she recover from this gaffe? How will America react?”
Trump, sensing a chance to pounce, picked up his bronze Batphone, the one with a dedicated line to the Fox News lair.
He told the credulous hosts Clinton had just made “the single biggest mistake of the political season.”
Coming from a fellow who has called Mexicans “rapists,” demanded a ban on Muslims and ridiculed countless people over their appearance, beliefs, gender, race, handi- caps, bodily functions, ethnicity, fashion, patriotism and general lot in life, such a declaration requires industrial-strength gall.
But Trump’s hypocrisy and faux outrage makes sense. He is battling for the White House and Clinton is wearing the enemy fatigues. What is much harder to understand is why the media is running wild with a sound bite that, when placed in proper context, is about as controversial as a Dr. Seuss book.
Clinton qualified that “basket of deplorables” jibe in her speech as “grossly generalistic.” She said some Trump supporters were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic,” all of which is demonstrably true.
Then she described the “other basket” inside Trump Nation: “people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change . . . (t)hose are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”
Curiously, CNN is less interested in that basket.
Even if you disagree with the proportions — Clinton later said she regretted using the word “half” — her observation is not inaccurate. Speaking generally, those are the two baskets. She does not “have contempt for American voters,” as Trump bellowed on Monday and the media dutifully repeated ad nauseam.
She was just speaking the ugly truth.
It’s almost as if there is a trickledown bully effect. Trump bullies the “losers and liars” in the media and the media gets all passive-aggressive with Clinton.
Trump keeps detonating the news cycle by saying absolutely nothing of substance. Clinton makes news not for her policies, but for when the media detonates something insubstantial.
And wearing the “Kick Me” sign is American democracy.
Trump is a witless man forever at wit’s end. Yet, it is Clinton who is judged for her “lack of transparency,” “aloofness” and “cold demeanour.”
It would be hilarious if it weren’t so appalling: In less than 60 days, the U.S. nuclear codes could be handed to a man who is so unhinged that, on balance, most Americans wouldn’t trust him with the passwords to their email for fear over what he might type.
Now that is a basket of deplorable. vmenon@thestar.ca