Media

Lazy media exposes its true hypocrisy in campaign coverage

by Joe Concha - 08/15/16 5:58 AM ET

There’s only one word that comes to mind when looking at the current media landscape as it pertains to lucid coverage of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton:

Lazy.

Sorry, two words:

Utterly lazy.

Make it five:

Utterly lazy and hopelessly partisan.

{mosads}Never before has it been so easy to point out the obvious, overwhelming hypocrisy that exists in coverage of this presidential election. It’s not even close. The examples are blatant and easy enough for an aspiring media reporter in his or her sophomore year to spot.

Exhibit A today in what has become a series of almost-daily examples of media coverage of Trump and Clinton — which polls show are the most flawed and untrustworthy candidates to run for president in the history of the country — comes in the form of Trump’s inelegant and obviously inaccurate comments around President Obama being “the founder of ISIS.”

Is that true? Absolutely not. And the media should take him to the mat for saying it and even repeating it when given the chance to clarify.

No worries. Almost all have across the board. Especially CNN, who prides itself on instantaneous fact-checking via on-screen chyrons as illustrated below.

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NBC did the same in sending out this Tweet from its Nightly News feed.

NEW: Donald Trump says only way Hillary Clinton can win Pennsylvania “is if cheating goes on;” does not specify if he is being sarcastic.

— NBC Nightly News (@NBCNightlyNews) August 12, 2016

But Trump’s issues with the press go far beyond NBC and CNN. It’s been an avalanche of negativity around the “founder” comment.

Those anti-Trump — voters and most of media alike — argue that Hillary Clinton, a former secretary of State, would never dream of engaging in such hyperbole on this topic against an opponent.

Except she has.

Earlier in the campaign season, Clinton said, “Trump is becoming ISIS’s best recruiter. They are going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists.”

Is that true? Absolutely not.

Politifact rated it a solid “false” on both Dec. 19, 2015, and again on Jan. 5, 2016, in a story titled, “No evidence for Hillary Clinton’s claim that ISIS is using videos of Donald Trump as recruiting tool.”

So here’s a random question: Where was the aforementioned avalanche of negative coverage against Clinton for engaging is the same kind of rhetoric against Trump?

Answer: It didn’t materialize at the time the statements were found to be untrue. There were no snarky tweets from NBC News. There were no feisty chyrons from CNN. There weren’t endless cable news segments hammering her for making such a reckless, over-the-top statement.

This isn’t about conservative or liberal, Democrat or Republican.

It’s a call for objectivity, for fairness. It’s called doing your job.

If Trump is guilty of a gaffe, call him out on it. If Clinton does the same, do the same.

And if both are guilty of the same crime, provide both examples. We saw it earlier this week with Trump’s Second Amendment comments as they pertained to doing something about Clinton from selecting Supreme Court justices.

“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” Mr. Trump said, quickly adding, “Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know.”

Some — including lawmakers and many media members — saw these comments as a call to violence against the Democratic nominee. Others argued it was simply a rallying cry for Second Amendment advocates to go to the polls in November.

So from a full-context, complete narrative perspective, a simple question needed to be asked after Trump made his comment:

Did Clinton ever make a similar controversial comment about an opponent?

The answer is yes.

In 2008, she argued she shouldn’t drop out of the race for the Democratic nomination against Barack Obama in late May despite having virtually no chance of winning because, “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”

The reference was met with criticism, sure (especially because most of media was decidedly pro-Obama by that point in the nomination process), but nothing like the wall-to-wall condemnation disguised as debate witnessed with Trump this week, which included several calls for him to drop out of the race.

From a media perspective this week when the Trump Second Amendment remark engulfed all coverage, was this simple comparison between Trump in 2016 and Clinton in 2008 presented to provide full context and not a one-sided narrative?

In most places on television and online, nope.

And it won’t happen moving forward.

Consequence: Six percent, six, of those surveyed have high confidence in the media. An Associated Press study says it all:

“Just 6 percent of people say they have a lot of confidence in the media, putting the news industry about equal to Congress and well below the public’s view of other institutions,” the study released in April concluded.

“In this presidential campaign year, Democrats were more likely to trust the news media than Republicans or independents,” the AP also found.

Gee, wonder why that is…

Concha is a media reporter for The Hill.

The views expressed by Contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.

Tags Barack Obama Donald Trump Hillary Clinton Hypocrisy liberal bias media