Hillary Clinton campaign truck.
The above headline is exactly what the mainstream media have been trying to avoid for a year and a half. If you’ve ever watched a one-sided sports event, you’ll know the reason why: viewers will tune out, and that’s bad for business. So what we all need to remember is that the mainstream media’s goal during this entire election season is to create more drama, which leads to higher ratings, and money for themselves. This business incentive can be seen in the coverage of Hillary Clinton‘s use of a private email server as Secretary of State, which the FBI just cleared as not a criminal offense.
Start by looking at the odds makers’ presidential picks: Hillary Clinton is the odds leader by a large margin to win the presidency. Moreover, this has been the case for a long time. In addition, Clinton’s odds of capturing the Democratic Party presidential nomination received an early boost nearly a year ago when Clinton secured the pledges of upwards of one-fifth of the delegates needed to win the Democratic Party nomination, from party officials, office holders and dignitaries known as “unpledged” or “super” delegates. Finally, anyone who closely followed the Democratic Party primary delegate math has known for months that Bernie Sanders had an all but impossible task to try to catch Clinton once she led Sanders by hundreds of delegates, given that the Democratic Party primaries allocate delegates proportionally rather than winner-take-all.
These odds, and the delegate math and polling data all along, may partially explain why Hillary Clinton is being held to an unfair double standard regarding her email use while Secretary of State. No matter that Clinton’s Republican predecessors, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice, did the same thing (which FBI Director James Comey cited as a reason not to prosecute Clinton), without a peep from Republicans in Congress. No matter that the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney White House used Republican National Committee servers for official government emails, then deleted and claimed to have lost millions of emails when Democratic members of Congress and Republican special prosecutors asked about them. No matter that the Clinton email story essentially began as a GOP conspiracy theory that Clinton was hiding emails showing that she did some bad thing regarding another GOP conspiracy theory, Benghazi.
This double standard applied to Hillary Clinton also comes in context of 25 years of Republican attacks on Bill and Hillary Clinton. Several Republicans even admitted that their goal behind their endless Benghazi hearings was to hurt Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy. These GOP attacks can be explained very simply: Republicans are terrified of the Clintons. Why? Because Bill and Hillary Clinton are so effective at espousing, promoting and implementing Democratic Party ideals. And they win elections. It seems obvious that, if Hillary Clinton weren’t such a threat to succeed as a presidential candidate and as president, the GOP and the right wing hate machine wouldn’t spend so much time and money against her.
The mainstream media should be ashamed about running with unfounded Republican conspiracy theories and reporting them as serious news when compared to coverage of Republicans. Indeed, even Clinton’s Democratic primary opponent Bernie Sanders got a free ride from the press this year, facing neither any national vetting of his background nor any meaningful pressure to release multiple prior years of tax returns. But the media have a business incentive to align with the Republicans’ political strategy. Therefore, we can no longer be surprised by “news” coverage of the woman who is likely to be our next president.
Photo by montegoodyk, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/uA28cD
