Public Comment

The media’s faux attempt to appear fair and balanced has led them to egregiously equate the ravings of a lunatic presidential candidate with the performance of a flawed but stable politician who has received plaudits as well as criticism for her public service of three decades. The media has abetted Donald Trump’s flooding of the truth with so many lies that anything looking like a fact is washed away. His surrogates are allowed to spout all kinds of falsehoods often with gross impunity and very little push back. 

At the same time, the media hypes any whiff of Clinton impropriety through nonstop talk fests, disregarding the lack of evidence (e.g., “Hey, maybe the Russians did hack your server and nobody knows about it.” “Close down that well-regarded Clinton Foundation because Trump and cronies cry pay-for-play”). News cycle after news cycle has been dominated with allegations leveraged as facts, not unlike what happened to John Kerry when he was “swiftboated” in 2004. 

On the PBS Newshour, USA Today’s Susan Page smiled as she stated she wasn’t “one hundred percent sure” why there had been nonstop media chatter about the Clinton Foundation, while the true story of the Trump Foundation’s use of other peoples money, pay to play donation, and nefarious purchase of art work, reported months ago, was not given the same coverage. Allow us to answer your query, Ms. Page. The media, including the PBS Newshour, chose to run repeated negative stories on the Clinton Foundation despite a lack of evidence, while eschewing the same type of repetitive reporting on Trump’s illegal use of his own charity’s funds as evidenced by public record. 

The media’s embrace of “accusation as news,” with regard to one presidential candidate in order to balance the lunacy and bigotry of the opposition, has created a modern-day Frankenstein. This Frankenstein is a new body of voters for whom veracity no longer has meaning, and therefore can be easily done away with, which endangers our democracy. 

The advent of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has resulted in many more Americans publicly promoting racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic sentiments and actions. Many of us have lamented to our friends and communities that we find a large portion of Trump’s voters more disturbing and dismaying than Trump himself, in terms of their mendacity and public displays of bigotry. According to a number of Holocaust survivors on record, Trump’s presidential campaign could have been a blueprint for the ascent of Hitler and Mussolini. Much of our current media continues to play a great and terrible part in this despicable state of affairs. To quote Charles M. Blow of The New York Times, “If the basket fits…”