How the “Liberal” Media Helped Make Trump Happen

I know you’re sick of hearing his name. But this piece isn’t really about him.

There’s a commercial spot for MSNBC in which Rachel Maddow says something like “Years from now, historians will be asking how Trump could have been elected.” She puts the question out there, but she’s never attempted to answer it herself. Neither have any of the MSNBC hosts. There’s a reason. They helped elect Trump.

Not by explicit endorsements of his candidacy. But by serving as a conveyor-belt and mass disseminator of everything that got thrown against Hillary Clinton and onto the radar screen, no matter how ill-founded.  Giving “bad optics” the prominence of established fact, lazily fitting every news story into the narrative of “untrustworthy Hillary,” paying more attention to the content of every leaked email than the much more significant story of the Russian origin of the leaks, continually declaring “momentum” for Sanders and Trump and “lack of enthusiasm” for Hillary and giving enormous free air-time to the big rallies and big crowds rather than Clinton’s more low-key campaigning. Everyday, serving up a steady stream of “suspect” optics, self-validating polls, and pseudo-crimes — the “email scandal” being the paradigm, but not the only, illustration — that made Hillary out to be “just as bad” as Trump. Seems like an insane equivalence now, doesn’t it?

The media’s demonization of Hillary is an old story, but until the 2016 election, it was largely the Right who promoted it. During the years of Bill Clinton’s presidency when Whitewater, “Travelgate,” and “filegate” were the scandals du jour, she was compared to Leona Helmsley, Ma Barker, and Eva Braun. Newt Gingrich (his mother reported) called her a “bitch.” G. Gordon Liddy was “amazed” that she was “not yet under indictment.” She was accused of having an affair with Vince Foster, and then of having him murdered. One of  the first in the emerging genre of Hillary-hate books, Peggy Noonan’s 2000 The Case Against Hillary Clinton described her as “a person who never ponders what is right,” “a squat and grasping woman,” and a “pathological narcissist.” In 1996, William Safire dubbed her a “congenital liar.”

But neither in Clinton’s run for the Senate in 2000 (she was the betrayed wife then) nor in her presidential campaign in 2008 (where she had the female “likability” problem) did the “liberal” media participate so eagerly in promoting the fiction of a perennially lying, calculating, untrustworthy politician as they did in 2015-16. That fiction was so powerful that Clinton could run against the biggest liar and most unscrupulous con man ever to appear on the American political scene and still be seen as less “honest” than him.

Bernie Sanders supporters and GOP witch-hunters provided the meat of the mythology. But it was thanks to the mainstream media that Hillary came to be blamed for every national disaster from racialized incarceration to the deaths of American diplomats during the raid on Benghazi. She was portrayed as being a Wall Street toady through the endless replay of a few polite remarks in public speeches, and accused of “recklessly” handling classified material (that had not, in fact, been marked as classified). Her vote alone, apparently, was responsible for the war in Iraq. She even had her own “familiar”—her husband—with whom she frequently merged, shape-shifting into a slithery, elusive man-woman called “The Clintons.”

Does this picture sound like it belongs in a gruesomely illustrated version of a Grimm’s fairy tale? The fact is that the mainstream “liberal” media promoted this fairy tale every morning and every evening, as pundits shook their heads over what Joe Scarborough called Clinton’s “mind-boggling lies” while treating Trump’s stream of total fabrications as business as usual. Even worse, in the beginning he was seen as refreshingly forthcoming, someone who (unlike the circumspect, cautious Clinton) “told it like it is” and was for that reason seen as more honest. (Hard to believe now, perhaps, but having written two books about it, I’ve got receipts to prove it.) Hillary Clinton—who rarely lost her cool and only got truly aggressive with Trump after months of “lock her up!”—was seen, in contrast, as “inauthentic.” 

During the primary, many members of the left-leaning media, irritated by the notion that Hillary was the “inevitable” nominee, took every opportunity to celebrate all of Bernie Sanders’s successes and decry what they continually represented as Clinton’s “establishment” connections. They also eagerly reported every comment, from Sanders supporters as well as Trump, that Hillary was “playing the woman card.” When Madeleine Albright said during a Clinton rally in New Hampshire that electing the first female commander in chief would be a true revolution, and that “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women,” the clip was played over and over, and The New York Times (never a friend of Hillary’s and later the biggest promoters of the “email scandal”) headlined an article: “Gloria Steinem and Madeline Albright Rebuke Young Women Backing Bernie Sanders,” and favorably quoted “young women who would like to see a female president elected someday” but “do not necessarily want to base their vote on that single factor.” “Shame on . . . Madeline Albright for implying that we as women should be voting for a candidate based solely on gender,” the New York Times quoted twenty-three-year-old Sanders supporter Zoe Trimboli.

The facts: Albright had been trotting the “special place in hell” line out at women’s conventions since 2006 and it had become such an old feminist chestnut that it had been memorialized on Starbucks’s coffee cups. But Sanders supporters didn’t know (or didn’t care about) the history behind it and neither the gang at MSNBC or the Times did anything to correct them. And at the same time as they berated Hillary for her “evasiveness,” Trump was indulged and allowed countless phone-in interviews on shows like Morning Joe, where he schmoozed amiably and was never taken to task for his lies and extremism. For months during the primary, all we heard was what a “straight shooter” Trump was. This became the favored Trump narrative for so long that no one bothered to worry whether anything he said was true or not.

As for Hillary’s “trust problem,” we heard about it virtually every day, not only from her political enemies, but from news commentators on every channel, who simply could not resist raising the issue, no matter how irrelevant it was to the main story they were reporting. We heard it in casual comments and jokes told by neighbors, as if it were an accepted scientific fact that needed no proof. We saw its influence on her approval numbers in the polls. In October, 2015, a Suffolk University–USA Today poll asked people to list the terms they associate with the top presidential candidates. The words “liar,” “dishonest,” and “untrustworthy” were most associated with Clinton.

Hillary’s “trust problem” is what Daniel Boorstin, back in the sixties, called a “pseudo-event.” A pseudo-event is something that acquires its reality not because it is accurate, but because the media has reported it, repeated it, exaggerated it, re-played it, made an indelible mantra of it. In the process, like a piece of trashy gossip that has made the rounds of the high school cafeteria, the pseudo-event becomes stamped in viewers' or readers' mind as true. A classic early example is Richard Jewell, who was wrongly accused of being the pipe bomber at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. All we heard about for weeks was the duct tape found under his bed. No real evidence against him existed and he was ultimately exonerated, but that duct tape was made into such a compelling detail that many people today still think he was the bomber.

Hillary Clinton's "trust problem” falls in this category. The GOP may have originated it through their endless attacks, investigations, and hearings, but it took the media's continual harping on Hillary's "trust issues" to turn them into the (pseudo) realities that they became. It was so easy: present every charge of the GOP as "breaking news," report every new email find as a potential treasure trove of hidden secrets, replay every political “gaffe” of Hillary’s endlessly (recall the huge flap over “deplorables”) remind viewers that "people don't trust her" every chance you get, and of course by the time a pollster calls and asks, the "trust problem" shows up as a documented "fact."

Later, when some of Trump’s liabilities were exposed, “bothsidesism” (or “false equivalences”) flattened out the huge differences between Trump and Clinton. Matthew Dowd’s November 1st tweet: “Either you care both about Trump being sexual predator & Clinton emails, or u care about neither. But don’t talk about one without the other.” Chuck Todd (then of Meet the Press) predicted on May 3, 2016 that the following six months would see “the two most unpopular people running for president, probably going down a low road, led by Trump—Clinton feeling, doing the same thing, and it’s sort of this race to the bottom.” The notion that there was any indication Clinton would—or could, by dint of her more reserved personality—take a road as low as Trump’s is absurd. But for many journalists, such “balancing” of the scales was seen as “objective” reporting.

A lot of this will be old news to many of you. What still remains a largely unspoken (and inconvenient) truth is that so far, the mainstream media has resisted owning any of this.

I personally ran into this resistance head-on when for a brief moment after The Destruction of Hillary Clinton was published, MSNBC seemed interested in it. Invited for an interview that took place on April 15, 2017, I was nervous, excited, and hopeful that my account—the first to put the blame on factors other than Hillary herself—might get some attention.

So there I was, early on Saturday afternoon, my hair freshly styled and my bottom perched on a high stool in a local TV station, fake landscape of Lexington, Kentucky in the background, earpiece plugged into “MSNBC Live.” I had prepared for what I guessed were going to be some key questions about my argument in the book. So I almost fell off my stool when I heard the lead-in:

“Next up: The author of a new book argues that Clinton made one big mistake that probably cost her the presidency.”

Was my earpiece plugged into Kellyanne Conway’s universe of alternative facts?

No, there on the chyron, in bold letters: “CLINTON’S BIGGEST MISTAKE.”

Since my book challenges the Clinton-blaming narrative with an analysis of the perfect storm that assailed her from multiple sides, left, right, domestic and foreign, I was eager—while madly searching my own brain for a strategy to retort without being rude—to hear Sheinelle Jones’ first question.

Ah. Clinton’s “big mistake,” Jones proposed, was that “she allowed the media to shape the narrative.”

Allowed?

With “EMAIL SCANDAL” and “CLINTON TRUST PROBLEM” headlined virtually every day, and with James Comey helpfully reminding us, just 11 days before the election, that Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tapes and the accusations of sexual abuse that followed were nothing compared to Clinton’s email crimes, just what could she have done?

“You underestimate the media’s power,” I said to Sheinelle.

But Sheinelle didn’t want to go there. She quickly pivoted to her next prepared question, which was about the power of “optics.”  Now, that is an actual argument of my book, and I was ready to talk about the readiness of the media, throughout the election, to headline “suspicious” appearances before the actual facts had become known.  As in: “We don’t know why Clinton needed to be helped into her car that day, but the optics aren’t good. What is she hiding?”

Sheneille had in mind something different, though, and produced a video of a Trump rally, and those now-famous cries of “lock her up, lock her up!” Pretty ugly, to be sure, but not what I meant when I wrote about “optics.”

Sheneille was determined, however, to get us off the topic of the media’s role and back to a Clinton-blaming narrative, and produced a visual detailing the points made in a “blistering commentary” (as she put it) by Andrew Sullivan: Hillary Clinton put Trump in the White House, she mishandled her campaign, she spent too much time fund-raising, didn’t visit the Rust Belt states, didn’t communicate with the “working class.” Blah blah blah.  

I’d heard all this multiple times, from the earliest post-mortems on the results of the election, in which Sanders enthusiast Michael Moore joined Chris Mathews in dissecting Hillary’s “disgraceful campaign” (as Moore described it.) But what the hell, I’d give it one last try. So I said I didn’t subscribe to Sullivan’s narrative. I went on to remark that working class people work, and have little time to follow hearings and speeches as they happen, but depend on the media’s sound-bytes early in the morning and after work--and what they got from those fragments was far from the truth of Clinton’s policies.

Uh Oh, venturing into media-blaming territory again.

So of course, Sheinelle and I were out of time. “We will be talking about this for a long time,” she summed it all up.

No more television interviews for me. Oh wait—there was one: A popular PBS women’s show interviewed me for an hour, then used a 20-second long clip as a totally irrelevant lead-in to a panel discussion of the similarities between Hillary Clinton and Ivanka Trump.

I was beginning to feel like a character in a Woody Allen New Yorker story, trapped in someone else’s novel.

And then, just a few days after my own book was published, Shattered came out.

Written by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, media-insiders and at that time familiar faces on MSNBC, it’s a "tell-all" about the "inside" of the campaign. It got reviewers salivating over the confirmation that Hillary ran a terrible campaign, was nasty to her staff, and made the familiar fatal blunders of ignoring key parts of the country, etc. Scant mention of Comey. Russia a passing aside. Sexism? Barely discussed, but frequently exhibited. (Example: (“Hillary’s severe, controlled voice … carried the sound of a disappointed teacher or mother delivering a lecture before a whipping”) And of course, no mention of media responsibility. All this was red Hillary-meat for most of the reviewers (One headline even said something like "Hillary even witchier than we thought"). And despite the absence of attribution of sources (which I can understand, given the surplus of nasty) it was applauded as a rigorous, objective piece of journalism and embraced as the official narrative of Clinton’s 2016 electoral loss.

August 2017: Not yet disappeared

My book was written. I was proud of it. I knew it had the facts on its side. I felt I had done right by Hillary without sacrificing truth or complexity. Was I irritated when “Shattered” climbed to the top of the bestseller list and my own book got disappeared? (It was the first book of mine that got absolutely no reviews in the mainstream press.) Yeah, I was angry about that. But I consoled myself with what I thought then was the probability that eventually the mainstream media would own up to its role in what would turn out to be the most disastrous mistake in electoral history.

It hasn’t happened yet. A couple of tepid “mea culpas” here and there about the attention paid to Hillary’s emails. But—as I’ve since learned—the last thing the mainstream media will do is blame itself for anything.

Why is it important to continue to hammer away at this? Because they’re doing it all over again. This time around it’s Biden’s “age problem” (while rarely noting that Trump is only a few years younger.) It’s his “running neck and neck with Trump in the polls” (They never actually examine the way the polls formulate questions or what the statistics might mean other than “Biden’s lack of popularity.”) It’s the constant reporting of the fact that most Americans say “the country is on the wrong track” (They never deconstruct this to explore what exactly people have in mind here.) It’s the “balancing” of good news about the economy with their “puzzlement” that despite Biden’s success, most Americans report that they aren’t doing well. And of course (shades of “Billary”) it’s the repetition of the Right’s merging of Joe and Hunter as the “Biden Crime Family.”

They give someone like Majorie Taylor Greene a disgraceful amount of air time as she rants about impeaching Biden. Well-informed people may scoff at this, knowing it to be the GOP up to its expected tricks. But it’s trickery that time and again has worked—as Roger Ailes, architect of the “don’t worry about lying, just repeat, repeat, repeat” strategy predicted. (And that was in the days when Fox didn’t get such a helping hand from the liberal media.) “Impeachment,” intoned often enough, plants roots in uncertain voters’ brains.

“Didn’t they learn their lesson from 2016?” I ask myself. But I’’m being rhetorical. I know the answers to that—and they are not only about ratings, or even a mistaken sense of what their responsibility as journalists is (that “balance” thing doesn’t equal fairness any more)—although all of those play a role. It also seemingly hasn’t sunk in that just “reporting” news doesn’t actually exist when whatever is continually circulated and repeated in the 24-hour news cycle determines what’s worth paying attention to—and thus creates the news. And it’s also a special kind of hubris, enabled by the outright liars on Fox, who they can always contrast themselves to, that imagines that so long as you aren’t deliberately deceiving people, you’re on the side of the angels. That hubris makes admitting the role they played in 2016 intolerable to them.

So no, they clearly haven’t learned any lessons from 2016. Because unlike Fox they were the good guys—and don’t think that they’ve got anything to learn.

For the full Monty on 2016, see my book The Destruction of Hillary Clinton: Untangling the Political Forces, Media Culture, and Assault on Fact That Decided the 2016 Election

I’ve also published some related pieces on substack: