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Saturday, December 3, 2016

MSNBC Still Getting Its (Post) Election Coverage Wrong

I know this may be beating a dead horse, but I couldn't help noticing the following in the past few days -

MSNBC offered extensive analysis of the verbal confrontation at Harvard University earlier this week between leaders of the Clinton and Trump presidential campaigns.   There's no video available available, but plenty of audio, and in case you haven't heard it, here's four minutes of it.

The exchange has been aptly described by MSNBC and everyone as "raw" and unprecedentedly acrimonious, which it certainly was.

MSNBC commentators further noted that both sides were defensive, it was too soon after such a contested election for a courteous discussion of what happened and why, etc - in other words, a continuation MSNBC of the equivalence of the Trump and Clinton candidacies, which typified its coverage of the campaign and now apparently its aftermath.  That's unfortunate, since the two candidacies were in almost no sense equivalent.

Missing from MSNBC's assessment of the Harvard panel was a discussion - even an acknowledgment - of the horror that the Clinton campaign now feels at the electoral college results of this election, in which someone with the least experience for the job in our history has been elected President - someone who has said all the things Trump has said about immigrants, women, and minorities - someone with white supremacist ties so strong that he's appointed Steve Bannon to a powerful White House position - and the list of frightening and outrageous statements and now appointments which go on and on.

There are many reasons why Clinton lost the electoral vote (and still a tiny chance that the recounts will change that), but the poor media coverage, which deliberately or not boosted Trump to legitimacy by presenting him as an equivalent candidate to Clinton when he was not on any level, is certainly one of the contributing factors.

I can only hope that this changes - at least in progressive media such as MSNBC - when Trump assumes the office in January.  There's never been a time in our nation's history when we required an aggressive, watchdog press, as envisioned by our founders, more than we do now.


another reason Trump got so many votes

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