How the Media Manufactured Hatred of Hillary Clinton
We all know the story. This is the hate election, the lesser-of-two-evils election, the most-unpopular-candidates-in-the-history-of-modern-presidential-politics election. Everybody hates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. If only we had different candidates from whom to choose, the pundits say, as they roll their eyes and emit heavy sighs! No doubt, you don’t like either one of them very much. You will pull the voting lever with resignation. Or so we are told.
But I began to speculate on how much of the Hillary hatred at least (Trump was very unpopular as reflected in polling data from the get-go) was driven by the press coverage, how many Americans were effectively brainwashed into hating Hillary or felt peer pressure to join the anti-Hillary chorus because the media kept telling us how awful she was, and we didn’t want to be outliers to the hate brigade.
And while there is no definitive way to measure the impact of press coverage on public opinion, I think a fairly powerful case can be made that the media narrative created the media narrative – yet another case of political post-modernism.
The fact is that Hillary Clinton wasn’t unpopular when she announced her decision to run in April 2015. If you look at the Gallup survey in March of last year, 50 percent of Americans had a favorable impression of Clinton, only 39 percent an unfavorable one. So there was clearly no deep reservoir of Clinton hatred among the general public at the time. On the contrary: Americans liked her; they liked her quite a bit.
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I realize there is an effort to cover the Republican tracks to the Big Lie that Clinton indeed did something egregiously out of bounds in her handling of emails and also broke a law. IT's just one more GOP Big Lie - which the M$M aided and abetted by helping to sell the Lie to the public. This is what brought down her approval numbers.
Even so, Hillary WON the election. The only reason the molesting fraudster is going into the White House is because of the iniquitous inequity of the Electoral College system which proportionally disenfranchises those of us in more densely populated districts and states and because of the rule of awarding all a state's electors to the winning candidate in that state rather than apportioning them in accordance with the popular vote. Traditional it may be, but certainly it is but it violates the principle of one man one vote.
here are links to two good articles on the Email scandal Big Lie:
The real Clinton email scandal is that a bullshit story has dominated the campaign
Media obsession with a bullshit email scandal helped Trump to the White House
Egregiously out of bounds to what others have done? Colin Powell had a personal email account in which he conducted official government business. HE advise Clinton to do the same. There is no difference, legally, in his using a personal email account and her use of a personal server maintained by Government IT types and in a facility guarded by a Government security personnel. There was no Government reg at the time, which prohibited use of personal email accounts.
Comey said some of the emails contained classified information - what Comey did not say was that
the State dept did not then or now agree that those emails contained Classified information. What Comey had to admit, when questioned by Rep. Matt Cartwright in that congressional committee hearing, was that NOT ONE OF THE EMAILS IN QUESTION HAD A CLASSIFIED HEADER ON IT - AS IS REQUIRED BY LAW. Comey also admitted that with none of the emails in question having a classified header on it - IT WAS REASONABLE FOR SEC CLINTON TO INFER THAT THERE WAS NO CLASSIFIED INFORMATION IN THE EMAILS.
BUT THESE ADMISSIONS BY COMEY WERE NOT REPORTED ON M$M NEWS. AS I said, the M$M did it's job well in MISINFORMING THE PUBLIC about Clinton's emails.
NOTe also that not one of the emails in question was initiated by Sec Clinton. They were all either sent to or forwarded to Sec Clinton.
ANd re her behavior as being extraordinary and at odds with how most staffers in the State Dept operate, see the following article:
The Hillary Clinton e-mail ‘scandal’ that isn’t
Does Hillary Clinton have a serious legal problem because she may have transmitted classified information on her private e-mail server? After talking with a half-dozen knowledgeable lawyers, I think this “scandal” is overstated. Using the server was a self-inflicted wound by Clinton, but it’s not something a prosecutor would take to court.
“It’s common” that people end up using unclassified systems to transmit classified information, said Jeffrey Smith, a former CIA general counsel who’s now a partner at Arnold & Porter, where he often represents defendants suspected of misusing classified information.
“There are always these back channels,” Smith explained. “It’s inevitable, because the classified systems are often cumbersome and lots of people have access to the classified e-mails or cables.” People who need quick guidance about a sensitive matter often pick up the phone or send a message on an open system. They shouldn’t, but they do. {"they shouldn't"??... Fuck! Be realistic. They wouldn't be able to get the things done, they need to, otherwise! Sometimes people need answers in a short time frame that can't be met by using the encrypted route._B USA}
“It’s common knowledge that the classified communications system is impossible and isn’t used,” said one former high-level Justice Department official. Several former prosecutors said flatly that such sloppy, unauthorized practices, although technically violations of law, wouldn’t normally lead to criminal cases.
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