Clinton takes swipe at ‘false equivalency’ in media coverage of 2016 election

Hillary Clinton took a dig at the press on Sunday for the way it covered her candidacy for president during the 2016 election.

Clinton’s remarks came during a speech she gave at the Pen America World Voices Festival, an international literary festival held in New York. Her speech was transcribed and shared on Twitter by New York Times reporter Sopan Deb.

During her speech, which was largely focused on the media climate under President Trump, she cited a professor specializing in the relationship between the press and the president to argue that the media’s “false equivalency” in its coverage of the 2016 election was “corrosive” and had a “leveling effect that opens the door to charlatans,” according to Deb.

“Now thankfully, in the races since 2016, coverage has been more straightforward and fact-based — perhaps because the races were close and inherently exciting — but I believe it also reflects an effort to avoid the errors that helped Mr. Trump to the White House,” Clinton said.

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“And I hope we’ll see more of this in the years to come,” she added.

In the past, Clinton has criticized the media’s focus on her emails during the 2016 election and their willingness to give Trump excessive airtime.

“None of Donald Trump’s scandals … generated the kind of sustained, campaign-defining coverage that my emails did,” Clinton wrote in her memoir “What Happened.”

On Sunday, Clinton also brought up the recent scandal surrounding Sinclair Broadcast Group after they required hundreds of anchors across the U.S. to read the same editorial about biased and fake stories.

She advocated for people to speak out against fake news and support the press by subscribing to newspapers.