Media Coverage Of 2016 Election Looks Worse Every Day
Every day, the press coverage of the 2016 election looks worse and worse. We already know about the excessive focus on the non-scandal of Hillary Clinton’s email server and the endless stories about the Clinton Foundation activities that involved no conflict of interest. And we also know that the press constantly dealt in rampant false equivalency during the campaign. What we didn’t know until recently is that some media outlets were actively suppressing damaging information they had on the record about Trump and covered up for the soon-to-be President.
Porn star Stormy Daniels had apparently gone on the record with at least three media outlets about her sexual relationship with Donald Trump. Slate, Fox News, and In Touch magazine all had the story before the 2016 election about Trump’s dalliance with the porn star while he was married to Melania. Remarkably, In Touch had their interview with Daniels back in 2011 and was able to confirm her story with contemporaneous witnesses.
There is a case to be made for not publishing stories about the personal sex lives of politicians, especially if it is consensual, and it is one I certainly agree with. But in the aftermath of the Access Hollywood tape and the corresponding accusations of sexual assault by multiple women, Trump’s affair with Daniels was certainly newsworthy, especially in light of Trump’s vehement denials of those relationships.
Far worse, however, was the fact that Slate and Fox both knew that Trump had paid Daniels $130,000 for her silence. The fact that a Presidential candidate had only recently paid off a woman he had an adulterous relationship with is without doubt news on its own. It was certainly news worth publishing after Trump’s denials of relationships with other women. As Kevin Drum says, “How can the president of the United States get away with what looks like hush money paid to a mistress in the middle of an election? How is it that this isn’t front-page news until Trump tells us what it was all about and shows us the agreement?”
We can all understand why Fox News didn’t run the story. It’s not really a news organization – it’s a propaganda outfit for the Republican party. But Slate’s decision is especially egregious and the defense that Slate did not have her consent to publish the story is hogwash. She spoke on the record and there was and never should be any agreement by a company that calls itself a news organization for the subject of an article to sign off on the entire story before it’s run.
Moreover, the Wall Street Journal had already run a story in early November, 2016 detailing the fact that the notoriously pro-Trump National Enquirer had paid another Trump accuser $150,000 and then “decided” not to run her story. Slate’s story would have provided an indication of a pattern of payoffs.
The media’s coverage of the 2016 election was abysmal. Yes, there were certain news organizations that did yeoman’s work, uncovering the evidence of money-laundering, the rampant fraud, the illegal use of foundation funds, and even hints of the Russian collusion. But those individual scandals were overwhelmed by the false equivalency given Hillary’s emails and the Clinton Foundation. Historians will look back at the coverage of the last election with some of the horror that we look back on the “yellow” journalism of the Hearst era, especially with the damage that Trump’s election has done to our country and our standing in the world.
One final note, in her In Touch story, Daniels described how she arrive at Trump’s hotel room “where she says she was greeted by a bodyguard named Keith, who let her inside”. I think we can agree that this is the very same Keith Schiller who recently testified he stood guard outside Trump’s hotel room in Moscow for a time and did not let any hookers in.
