Why The Media Want Hillary Clinton To Shut Up

[wyldwolf]

Why The Media Want Hillary Clinton To Shut Up

There is something strange about the reproachful media response to What Happened, Hillary Clinton’s new book on the 2016 campaign.

Now everyone knows that the Washington press corps dislikes and distrusts the former Democratic nominee. After all, several of its most eminent members have admitted their herd’s prejudice against her. But the nearly unanimous demand for her to be silent — often presented in the form of blind quotes from her alleged “friends”– cuts against normal journalistic curiosity, let alone the usual lust for fresh gossip.

And it doesn’t matter how many times she accepts responsibility for her unexpected defeat by Donald Trump in the Electoral College. Pundits and reporters insist she hasn’t acknowledged her guilt sufficiently, with the requisite sincerity. So the best choice, according to the press, would have been for her to say and write nothing.

Nobody in the media is eager to hear Clinton’s perspective on that catastrophic election cycle — especially not the part about them and their performance. They would rather not reflect on why her “damned emails” were so ridiculously overemphasized. Or why Trump enjoyed constant and groveling promotion as a television spectacle. Or why journalists produced so many misleading “investigations” of the Clinton Foundation, yet so very few examinations of Trump’s longstanding connections to organized crime. Or why vital policy differences between the two candidates received a tiny fraction of media attention.

The press may not top the list of those who earned blame for the election’s outcome, notably including former FBI director James Comey, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, various unnamed Russian malefactors, and Clinton herself. But she has legitimate grievances over how she and her opponent were treated by the American media, particularly several of its most illustrious outlets.

The statistical and analytical brief for her case is already publicly available, in a path-breaking report released last month by a team of scholars from Harvard and MIT.

Titled “Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 US Presidential Campaign,” their study used an enormous collection of data from online sources to map the impact of a wide variety of news sources. What they found was a sharp asymmetry between left and right outlets that benefited Trump and damaged Clinton. And while most mainstream coverage treated both candidates negatively, it “largely followed Trump’s agenda.” That meant reporting about Clinton focused on “scandals” involving the Clinton Foundation and emails, while reporting about Trump focused on his issues, such as immigration.

The report delivers a fascinating, highly detailed and fairly discouraging portrait of the media constellation and its role in our democracy. But its election findings went deeper, revealing how the extremely partisan and inaccurate right-wing outlets, led by Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News, set the agenda for the more “objective” mainstream media.



http://www.nationalmemo.com/media-clinton-shut-up/?utm_campaign=website&utm_source=sd&utm_medium=email

[still_one]

1. Thanks for this wyldwolf, The assessment is right on, and the press has absolutely no remorse for

what they did, and as pointed out are still doing it

[dalton99a]

2. They're proud of it

[still_one]

3. I know, it is disgusting

[Kentonio]

4. Hmm..

"And it doesn’t matter how many times she accepts responsibility for her unexpected defeat by Donald Trump in the Electoral College. Pundits and reporters insist she hasn’t acknowledged her guilt sufficiently, with the requisite sincerity. So the best choice, according to the press, would have been for her to say and write nothing."

Perhaps because you can't really claim to accept 'absolute personal responsibility' yet then go on to blame everyone and everything around you.

As for..

"Nobody in the media is eager to hear Clinton’s perspective on that catastrophic election cycle — especially not the part about them and their performance."

The idea that the media don't want to hear a major political figure speak is laughable. The point people keep making is that its not doing her or us any favors right now, not that she should be somehow 'silenced'. She's one of the most famous people in the world, if she has things to say she's never going to struggle to get people to print it or show it on their TV channels. Not everyone is that lucky.

[sharedvalues]

6. What? Media bears massive blame and they don't want to discuss

The media desperately wants to deflect attention from their own performance in 2016. It's only natural - who wants to have their mistakes discussed?

First the broadcast media tried to blame social media for causing division, not them.

Now they'd rather avoid discussing how the media elected Trump.


(I agree with you that the effort to silence Hillary isn't that large)

[Kentonio]

7. The head of CNN already came out and said they made a mistake giving Trump so much free coverage.

What else are you expecting the media to do exactly? They're the media, they're going to print/show whatever they think people want to see or here, or whatever is a hot story at the time.

[sharedvalues]

8. Expect discussion of what got Trump elected

Every time you see handwringing in the press "What do Dems need to do?". "What went wrong?", then...

We should all expect the media to say
"We are largely responsible. Our coverage got Trump elected. We normalized him. We allowed him to lie without telling our viewers what was truth."

And then I expect the media to realize how their bothsidesism can be exploited by liars, and realize how their profit seeking harms America, and start to do something about both.


That is what I expect. That's what you should expect too if we want to return to free, tolerant, fair America.

[Kentonio]

10. That's what you expect?

Do you also expect unicorns to deliver rainbows and free candy every day?

Come on be realistic for goodness sake, the media don't owe the party any favors, and its not their job to fight elections for us. The media did not 'allowed him to lie without telling our viewers what was truth', they spent vast amounts of time reporting on his shocking statements and behavior, in a way that in any other year would have utterly crushed his candidacy.

You want to blame someone, blame the American people for letting that asshole into the White House, and blame us for not being able to run a candidate/campaign capable of beating the worse GOP candidate in history. Blaming the media just sounds pathetic, and will do nothing other than to piss them off further ensuring our jobs become even harder in 2018/2020.

[jalan48]

12. +1

The American people are responsible. Why do so many choose to stay home and not vote? Perhaps it's because they don't like what's being offered them. We've gone so far down the rabbit hole blame game we can't see that the exact same outcome may take place in 2020 unless we, as a Party, do some serious soul searching and offer something different next time. Rehashing Hillary Clinton's loss over, and over, and over again isn't helping us if we just continue placing blame on others.

[Bradical79]

9. But they kept doing it

Even after Trump was elected. They hired and highlighted a bunch of non-journalists to lie to people on a daily basis for ratings.

MSNBC is even getting onto the fake balance bandwagon.

[Kentonio]

11. They're reporting the news for the country, not just for our half of it

The news, in particular the big newspapers have actually done a greta job since the election of hammering him on his misdeeds, and even FOX of all people have presenters slamming him. This is probably the most favorable media we will ever have, let's try not to hijack it by expecting the impossible.

[sharedvalues]

5. Exactly, thank you. Media wants to deflect

They also dislike Hillary because she's not an easy quote. Much of the media just wants to write their stories and go home to their kids. Hillary is closed off.

[BeyondGeography]

13. They don't want her to shut up, they want to tell her to shut up

There's money in the latter, not the former. They're not upset about the book; it's fresh grist for the mill.

[Snake Plissken]

14. The main reason is, even Hillary couldn't wait for the election to get over with back in November

It was the most torturous election of all time, nobody wants to relive it.

[world wide wally]

15. It seems ironic that the institution that is most dependent on the right to free speech would

want to stifle someone's free speech. Yes, the coverage of Trump was abysmal without question, but they, like Trump, can claim innocence because it was not what "they personally" said, it was more the flooding of all the news shows with Trump surrogates. They would claim that Trump didn't say something he clearly said and never get pushback from the hosts.
They also would play Trump rallies from start to finish and hardly show any Clinton rallies at all. This is how and why the media is able to deny any complicity in getting Trump elected. Their is plenty of blame to go around, but the ultimate culprit is the American people.
It should never have even been close but Trump appealed to their lowest common denominator.

[maddiemom]

16. And now they really need to stop covering the Trump "rallies."

The usual speeches about matters affecting the nation, the state of the union, the world, are one thing. He'll try to make them about himself, anyway, and if he doesn't he'll get raves for "being presidential" This won't stop him, but lack of publicity might slow him down." Can anyone else remember another POTUS who began campaigning for the next election (AND raising money ) as soon as he took office?

[ismnotwasm]

17. K&R

[Orsino]

18. Well, no one likes a loser...

...and she technically lost. In the minds of the idiot media, this means that she and her agenda were rejected by a majority of Americans, and we know that the opposite is true. The rest of the outrage is because she's a woman who had the gall not to sit down and shut up when she was told for over a quarter-century.

The menz have been waiting for that long and more to punish her, and now they can rub her face and ours in the 2016 "loss." They now get to reset the clock, and come the next election can once again ask, "Is America ready for a woman president?"

[KY_EnviroGuy]

19. Our media goes for sensationalism and entertainment value...

...with accuracy, healthy editing and pertinence be damned. We now live in a world obsessed with the next big "feel good" thing on a 4" phone screen. I worry about the effect it's having on our collective conscience and especially on our children's development.

Electronic media is now our primary means of acquiring accurate, unbiased news - but finding it now takes some digging. Pertinent, accurate news is often boring and our brains unfortunately have been reconditioned to reject anything boring.

Newspapers and magazines are dying - both of which gave our minds plenty of time to digest content. In this age of demands for 100% physical and mental efficiency, there's no time allowed to think with any detail!

Our media outlets no longer seem to have a moral anchor to healthy values, just as our large corporations have lost their anchor to our communities. It's a new world and progressives must adapt.

The report the Harvard/MIT article referenced is 142 pages long and I'm hoping to read as much as I can stand without loosing it.