Yesterday, I wrote a diary detailing what is clearly a proclivity of corporate media to deny what is increasingly likely a Clinton landslide in the 2016 election, in an effort to gin up controversy and faux-scandal for the purpose of creating a horse race. Why? Because a landslide election has no suspense. . .no surprise. Therefore, less reason to watch and that means, less viewers to sell advertising to.
As I pointed out yesterday, Twitter user Liberal Juice reported that a member of the Meet The Press Daily panel said "We're going to do all we can to make this race suspenseful."
xJust heard a panelist on @MSNBC MTP Daily panel say "We're going to do all we can to make this race suspenseful." My point proven. Ugh...
— Liberal Juice (@LiberalJuice) September 1, 2016I was told that this was mere conspiracy theory that cannot be proven. . .this, in spite of the above tweet and other related information:
Multiple times already this year, we have been subjected treated to stories about email servers, charitable foundations, conspiracy theories about the health of a candidate, and of course, about Benghazi. Some of it has been news-worthy, most of it has not. The right likes to complain that there is a media bias against them, however, studies have shown otherwise. . .the media bias is in their favor.
Just in the last few weeks, both AP and Politico have taken turns at putting forward non-stories as smoking guns. . .generating unnecessary and unfounded hype in an effort to draw readers and other news outlets into the snare in an effort to drive up advertising revenues.
And now what do we have today? This frothy mouthed non-story from the New York Times:
Emails Raise New Questions About Clinton Foundation Ties to State Dept.
I won’t deconstruct it, because DKos heroine Laura Clawson has already done yeoman’s work of that here. . .and then calls out the media hypocrisy here and here.
This is all the right has going for them, folks. . .a media who has a common interest in keeping the Trump™ campaign propped up long enough to generate enough money to pay the salaries of glorified copy readers and make money-hungry corporatists temporally happy.
Trump™ gets a pass from the media because it wants a horse race. . . .it needs a horse race. . .and because he lies so often, that it is what we expect of him and it rarely has the ability to shock us anymore. Oh, the media will mention it occasionally until Trump™ barks at the media outlets and they back off. But if they gave 1/10th of the attention to vetting all of the lies, malfeasance and nonsense that he spews forth, that they give every non-event concerning Hillary, this election would not be in doubt by even the most skeptical voters.
In the mean time, we need to continue to push back against the nonsense. Every fabricated scandal, every profit motive-generated story, every fact-averse narrative that gets put forward needs people like us wagging a finger in their face and challenging them to do real journalism. . .you know. . . that stuff that relies on the truth and not just the bits that are surface-level salacious?