The media is STILL massively downplaying Donald Trump’s criminal liability
When it was revealed during the 2016 election cycle that Hillary Clinton had been using a private email server during her time as Secretary of State, the entire mainstream media – left, right, and center – treated it as a national security breach and a criminal scandal. The media spent the entire election cycle implying and often outright insisting that Clinton would end up criminally indicted over her email, even though it was fairly clear from the start that she hadn’t broken any laws.
In fact the media’s coverage of the “Hillary email scandal” – which ended up not even being a scandal once the facts came out – serves as Exhibit A of how the media can collectively lose its mind and resort to fictional coverage of an imaginary scandal in the name of chasing ratings. We’ve long held up the email debacle as an example of everything that’s gone wrong with the media over the past several years, and everything that needs to change.
What’s always been remarkable is that, even as it gradually became more clear that Donald Trump was going to face serious criminal trouble if he lost reelection, the media still had little to no interest in acknowledging as much. When the Manhattan District Attorney’s office went all the way to the Supreme Court to get then-president Trump’s tax returns, it meant he was likely going to end up indicted if he lost, but the media ignored this. The DA’s office has since expanded its criminal probe into Trump and has an active grand jury, but the media mostly ignores this too. The Fulton County DA has a special grand jury and clearly intends to indict Trump, but the media only covers that story briefly and occasionally. And even as more breadcrumbs emerge to suggest that the DOJ may indeed be targeting Trump, the media ignores these breadcrumbs and claims to know that the DOJ is not investigating Trump (even though it can’t possibly know that).
There’s a reason the media almost uniformly refuses to admit that Trump is on track for prison, and it’s the exact same reason the media spent 2016 uniformly pretending Hillary Clinton was on track for prison. It’s not any sort of partisan bias. It’s not an attempt at helping one candidate or hurting the other. It’s simply about the one thing it’s always about: ratings.
The media had no idea how it was going to get ratings out of what would have been a non-competitive Hillary Clinton blowout victory in 2016. So it latched onto her imaginary email scandal, hyped it as if it were some kind of criminal scandal, and managed to get ratings out of it every single day of the election cycle. All it had to do was lie about the nature of the scandal – which the media has disturbingly comfortable doing over the past decade, as everything has become about ratings.
Similarly, once Trump was bounced from office and banned from Twitter, the media lost its ability to get automatic daily ratings by merely obsessing over his ludicrous words that day. So instead the media spent 2021 pretending that Trump was on the verge of some kind of whirlwind comeback and was a lock to take over the country in 2024. Ratings plummeted anyway, perhaps a testament to how few among the public were willing to fall for this baseless nonsense about a Trump comeback. But even as it’s become crystal clear that Trump is on track for indictment in at least two jurisdictions, the media – on the left and right – has still largely been sticking with its “Trump 2024” narrative.
Now the media is facing a potential breaking point. The updates from the Fulton County criminal probe are becoming more frequent, and they keep getting worse for Trump. The January 6th Committee is making clear that it’ll refer Trump for federal criminal prosecution, which will have a strong chance of pushing the DOJ into indicting Trump whether it was already planning to or not. The media may soon have to abandon the fictional “Trump 2024” narrative, simply because no one will believe it anymore, in favor of an honest narrative about Trump being on a path to prison.
Fittingly, even as the media faces this breaking point, we’re all now learning that Donald Trump illegally took crucial presidential records when he left the White House, and stashed them in his private Mar-a-Lago residence. This isn’t merely a violation of the Presidential Records Act. Given that Trump surely knew investigators would come looking for the kinds of records he stole, such as his suspicious private communications with Kim Jong-Un, Trump may have also committed felony obstruction of justice.
So now we have a story about Trump illegally mishandling government communications, in an attempt at hiding those communications from the public record. This is exactly what the media spent the entire 2016 election cycle falsely accusing Hillary Clinton of having done. You’d think the media would cover this Trump scandal in the same manner, right?
Well, in a word, no. The New York Times, which broke the story, has gone out of its way to characterize Trump’s actions as “improper,” not illegal. Sure, the story acknowledges that Trump violated the Presidential Records Act. But the Times goes out of its way to avoid acknowledging the fact that Trump’s violation of this particular law is indeed a crime. That’s remarkable given that this same New York Times once published an article that was so aggressive in falsely accusing Hillary Clinton of criminal behavior with her emails, the Times ended up having to publish two different sets of retractions just to walk it all back.
It’s not just the New York Times. MSNBC’s Morning Joe is also painting Trump’s stolen records scandal as mere weird behavior on the part of a “weird” man, instead of acknowledging that it’s a criminal scandal that could result in Trump’s prosecution. What we’re seeing is yet another attempt by the media at pretending Trump isn’t actually facing any criminal trouble, so that it can continue to milk the “Trump 2024” nonsense for ratings a bit longer. After all, if the public figures out that Trump is on track for prison, it’s not going to stay glued to scary news coverage about how Trump is somehow going to take over the country.
It’s not as if people aren’t noticing how dishonest the media is being with these stories. The words “improperly” and “illegally” have been among the top trends on Twitter today, because just that many people have been calling out the media for continuing to massively downplay Donald Trump’s criminal liability. Of course if the media isn’t the real world, neither is Twitter. When the media collectively decides to push ratings-driven false narratives, it’s only forced to change its mind when audiences at large begin to see through it.
So if you want this kind of behavior by the media to stop, and you want the media to shift into a more honest gear, you’ll have to get out and push, so to speak. Your job as a political activist is to not only educate yourself on what’s factually goin on, but to also educate those around you so that they’re not prone to falling for the media’s ratings-driven false narratives. When the media sees that a given narrative isn’t working anymore, it’ll shift to a new one. And if we can make sure that audiences are sufficiently educated on what’s really going on, the media will inevitably conclude that it has to stick to honest narratives if it indeed wants to hit its ratings marks.
