A 30 Year Smear Campaign: How the Media Manufactured Hatred of @HillaryClinton [View all]

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Worth the time to read and pass on.

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How the Media Manufactured Hatred of Hillary Clinton

Clinton's popularity didn't start to plummet until the press focus turned to her emails.

http://billmoyers.com/story/last-night-3/#.WBFZB0iuEa0.twitter



By Neal Gabler | October 25, 2016
How the Media Manufactured Hatred of [...]

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton speaks to members of the media aboard her campaign plane. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

As the late columnist Walter Winchell used to say: Onions. Onions to virtually everyone in the press corps for promoting a narrative that has, I believe, become a self-fulfilling prophecy. More than that, it is a narrative, I also believe, that undermines confidence in the election process and damages the country.



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.

Already by June, however, her favorability had not only taken a hit. It had plummeted. By July, according to Gallup, her favorability hit an all-time low with only 38 percent positively and 57 percent viewing her negatively — putting her 19 points underwater........................................


.....................Wrong-headed or not, none of this explains Clinton’s July 2015 plunge; it only certifies it. What makes that plunge somewhat baffling is that Clinton made several major policy pronouncements that month – two laying out the broad strokes of her economic policy, and another discussing race. Again, whether you agreed with these pronouncements or not, she was being a serious candidate. It certainly couldn’t have accounted for the sudden turn by voters.

But policy wasn’t what the media were focused on that July. They were focused on emails. There was a court-mandated dump of Clinton’s emails late that month, and the media leapt on it with alacrity. This certainly wasn’t the first time the public had heard about Clinton using a private email server while Secretary of State. That news had come out in March 2015 and hadn’t affected her favorability at all. But the fixation on emails, which had long been an addiction among Republicans and the right-wing media, suddenly became an addiction in the mainstream media as well. According to a Lexis-Nexis search, The New York Times, to cite one example, had seven stories that month with “Clinton” and “emails” in the headline. More important, most news sources reported erroneously that Clinton was the subject of a criminal investigation by the FBI. In reporting a sudden drop in Clinton’s popularity in its own NBC/Wall Street Journal poll that month, NBC professed not to understand why, though it had only to look at its own reporting. You could say that Clinton was sabotaged.



And that wasn’t all.....................