Yesterday evening I witnessed something frightening.
The masterful jazz trombonist Robin Eubanks was performing
at Dizzy’s at Lincoln Center with his big band. In his introduction to a
composition titled “Yes We Can—Victory Dance,” he put in a plug for Hillary and
asked everyone to vote. Only about half the audience applauded. The other half
sat on their hands grimly. I could see many frowns on the faces and some
uncomfortable body language.
That means that about half the audience at an upscale jazz
club on Labor Day in liberal New York City are either supporting Donald Trump
or vehemently opposed to Hillary Clinton. Of course, some may have just objected
to entertainers interjecting their political opinions into their performance,
but the piece the band was going to play was political in nature and we’re
talking about jazz, a musical art form whose practitioners are much given to
political statements in their work. (I’m hopeful that one day soon National
Public Radio (NPR) will invite Eubanks on “All Things Considered” to discuss his political opinions, as it did
the right-wing Merle Haggard four years ago to discuss why he hated President
Obama.)
The frightening thing is that the large number of people not
clapping—or cheering insanely—when Eubanks endorsed Hillary is that it suggests
that Donald Trump may actually win, or at the very least that the mainstream
media’s long campaign to make the country dislike Hillary Clinton has really
succeeded (more on that below). Keep in mind that this audience was whiter and
probably wealthier and more educated than the United States as a whole, but
that means it was full of the educated whites who are supposed to be abandoning
the GOP over Trump.
I would have hoped that, when faced with the choice between
a poorly informed and compulsively lying narcissist who failed in business,
cheated many people out of money and has a long history of racism on one side and
a competent, educated public servant with a track record of achievement on the
other, virtually everyone in the country other than unrepentant racists would
embrace Hillary and that the crowd would have gone as wild over Eubank’s
endorsement as they did over his wonderful music.
As the group played “Yes We Can—Victory Dance,” which at
times required many of the group members to clap their hands in unison as if at
a peace or civil rights rally, I surveyed the audience wondering about the
motives for anyone supporting Donald Trump, even after his frequent
inflammatory and often racist or sexist outbursts, his multitude of lies about
the state of the country and his past, and the revelations that his real estate
and casino businesses were mostly failures, that he is involved in 3,500
lawsuits and that he may have paid off at least two politicians to get lawsuits
against his university dropped.
Based on months of following the Trump malevolence unfold, I
have identified roughly five groups of Trump supporters, or perhaps I should
write, five reasons to vote for Trump:
1.
Racists.
2.
Those who do not think a woman should be
president.
3.
Supreme Court voters, those who will vote for
Trump because he says he will nominate conservative Supreme Court justices
(although I think virtually all people in this group primarily support Trump
for one of the other reasons listed here).
4.
The ultra-wealthy and wealthy whose sole
criteria for voting is who will lower taxes on the wealthy more, keep the
minimum wage the lowest and impose the fewest regulations on their businesses.
5.
Those whom the news media have brainwashed to
hate Hillary Clinton.
The last two groups have a causal relationship, as it is the
ultra-wealthy who own the mainstream and right-wing news media that have
demonized Hillary for the past 30 years, essentially holding her to a standard
much higher than any other public official has ever been held. There are almost
as many examples of the media treating Hillary differently from others as there
are of Trump telling bold-faced lies:
·
While there was no investigation of the 13
terrorist incidents at U.S. embassies around the world during the Bush II
Administration, millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent looking for
something that Hillary Clinton did wrong to cause Benghazi or in the State
Department dealings with the Clinton Foundation.
·
There has been no investigation of the millions
of emails the Bush Administration destroyed. Likewise no investigation of the emails
of Condoleezza or Colin Powell even though the U.S. foreign policy under their
leadership was pretty disastrous. Powell, BTW, advised Hillary to destroy her
emails, which she didn’t do. I guess that’s why the media is going after
Hillary for a lack of transparency.
·
While conveniently forgetting Trump’s early
support of the Iraq War and his many overt racist statements in the 1980’s and
1990’s, the news media continues to hammer Clinton over her vote to authorize
the Iraq War and her husband’s support of the crime legislation of the 1990’s
that proved to be de facto Jim Crow laws. The implication is that only Hillary
among all those misled by the Bush Administration knew that the Bushies were
lying and that among thousands including many civil rights leaders only Hillary
understood the racial ramifications of tougher sentencing laws.
No one in the media mentions it, but when Hillary left her
post as Secretary of State, she was the most popular person in the United
States, if not the world. It was then
that the news media resumed its anti-Clinton campaign of the 1990’s.
If you want to see a case history of unfair treatment of
Hillary over the years, read the article of two years ago by Oliver Willis and
Hannah Groch-Begley detailing the NewYork Times’ columnist Maureen Dowd’s 21-year-long verbal war against Hillary, all based on misperceptions, assumptions and Dowd’s special brand
of social-psychobabble. Dowd’s unfair and mostly fabricated definition of Hillary has become the
playbook for a large part of the mainstream news media: Hillary is a weak
candidate because she is a policy wonk (which means she has no passion), and is
graceless, sneaky, secretive, devious and open to corruption. Earlier in the
election cycle, the news media kept their anti-Hillary sentiments under
control, preferring to focus on Trump’s many outrageous statements, rude
insults and personal feuds. In retrospect, it seems as if the anti-Trump
coverage was always about trying to help any other Republican (other than Ted
Cruz) secure the nomination.
Since it began looking like Hillary could win in a
landslide, the mainstream and right-wing news media have ramped up their
anti-Hillary storylines. At the same time, the media has begun to treat Donald
Trump with the softest of kid gloves. His trip to Mexico was taken seriously.
Many reporters actually bought the line that Trump had made his immigration
policy less Draconian and extreme than it actually was. While ignoring prima
facie evidence that Donald Trump paid off elected officials in Texas and
Florida, the news media continues to pore over Hillary’s emails, finding that
neither she nor the Clinton Foundation did anything illegal or even unethical,
which the news media has hidden under assertions of “the appearance of
unethical conduct.” Chuck Todd of “Meet the Press” has made it his life’s work
to sell the country on the idea that Hillary’s handling of emails was illegal.
The media has touted the false and baseless rumors that Hillary is physically
incapacitated, despite the fact that she has a standard doctor’s letter that
covers all the information given by former presidential candidates. By
contrast, the issue of Trump’s health quickly faded, even though the letter he
has is completely unprofessional and appears to come from a quack. The media seems to have forgotten that Trump
has still not released his taxes. For some reason the many bankruptcies,
business failures, lawsuits and the fact that he has taken tax deductions available
only to people with annual incomes under $500,000 have not compelled them to
dig deeper or to probe further—they’re probably too busy trying to figure out
how to spin the meeting of Secretary Clinton with a Nobel prize winner as part
of a corrupt enterprise.
The day after Labor Day provides an excellent example of the
mainstream news media’s stealth campaign against Hillary. NPR’s story on the
campaign starts with what Donald Trump will be doing today, followed by a long
quote by someone in the Trump campaign. The story ends with a short sentence on
what Clinton is doing today, presented as an afterthought.
Meanwhile, the New
York Times has a front-page story that draws parallels between the two
campaigns. The article repeats the lie
that there are “nagging doubts about her candidacy,” without specifying what
those doubts might be. The writer presents Trump’s problems—primarily his lack
of appeal to minorities—as a challenge that he is trying to overcome.
Elsewhere, the Times prints a story
about a Bernie Sanders rally for Hillary that focuses exclusively on the small
number of Bernie supporters there who may not vote for Hillary. Near the end of
the article appears the sentence: “Still, polls show that the majority ofMr. Sander’s former supporters, like Lauren Glass, 22, plan to vote for Mrs.Clinton.” The number of former Bernitians
intending to vote for Hillary is actually 90%, making the statement “the
majority” as close to a lie as a true statement can be. The angle for the story
is completely misleading and meant to sow further “doubts” about Hillary.
The Times also
carried a very positive story about the supposed influence of Norman Vincent
Peale’s church on Donald Trump, despite the fact that Trump has never joined
the church and never given it a contribution. Besides being a minister, Norman
Vincent Peale was a religiously-based motivational speaker who wrote The Power of Positive Thinking. Peale’s
optimistic conflation of doing well and doing good has made him a favorite of
mainstream business-oriented Republicans since the 1930’s. If it wasn’t in the Times, I would swear that the article was
part of the Trump campaign to appeal more to traditional Republicans, similar
to his many speeches about helping African-Americans he has given to white
audiences.
The Times also had
a snarky story about Hillary, who on Labor Day let reporters ride with her on
her jet for the first time in the campaign. This story continues the mainstream
news media’s campaign to paint Hillary as unavailable just because she hasn’t
held any news conferences. The “Hillary is not accessible” storyline
demonstrates the underlying anti-Hillary sentiment in the mainstream news
media. Hillary has given a tremendous number of one-on-one interviews. As a
public relations professional for more than 30 years, I can state unequivocally
that reporters prefer one-on-ones to news conference for several reasons: 1)
They can ask more questions; 2) They can get into more depth on the issue(s) of
most interest to them; 3) They are more likely to get exclusive breaking news,
since by definition there can be no exclusive at a news conference attended by
many. The news media should be happy that there are so many opportunities to
talk to Hillary one-on-one, but instead they turn it around and make it part of
a false narrative.
This news cycle also saw the announcement by one of the
moderators of upcoming debates, Chris Wallace of Fox News, declare that he
would not point out when either of the candidates makes a factual misstatement
during his debate; Wallace must know he has given Trump carte blanc to lie as
much as he wants in the debate.
This mainstream media support of Trump began in full swing as
soon as the Khan controversy died down. And it seems to be having an impact.
The latest polls show the race to be in a virtual tie. The latest CC-ORCpoll has Trump up by two points, 45%-43%. Hillary still has a nearly insurmountable
lead in the Electoral College, ahead in virtually every swing state and within
striking distance in a number of historically Republican states. But still, it’s
frightening to think that almost half the country now intends to vote for
Trump.
As I have written before, you would think that the specter
of a Trump presidency would induce the mainstream news media to skewer coverage
in favor of Hillary, or at the very least to play it straight instead of
helping the Republicans, as they usually do.
But it looks like I’m wrong.
Maybe the media corporate overlords figure that we’ve had psychopaths,
the ignorant and liars for president before and have survived. Bush II and
Reagan were ignorant liars, while Nixon was a lying psychopath. And we’ve had racists in the White House,
too, including Woodrow Wilson and Nixon.
Presidents with little experience have made some awful mistakes, such as
Kennedy escalating the cold war and arranging for the replacement of the
Vietnam government, Clinton’s handling of healthcare reform or Obama bending
too far to compromise with the unrealistic demands of Republicans.
But only twice in our country’s history have we had a
Democratic president who was a centrist leaning left with both houses of
Congress Democratic and the Republic party in disarray. In both instances, the
conditions lasted about two years. Coincidentally, virtually every piece of
federal legislation that created more equality of income and wealth was passed
during these short periods, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.
As of August 10, the polls suggested that the possibility of a third confluence
of these factors could occur. And that’s
what the ultra-wealthy who own and control the mainstream news media are afraid
of. They’ve spent more than 35 years undoing most of the damage that New Deal
and Great Society legislation did to the ultra-wealthy’s self-imagined
privilege to dominate the economy and exploit everyone else. They don’t want to
see their efforts undone by the Democratic platform of
higher taxes on the wealthy to pay for social welfare programs, lowering the
cost of education, improving our infrastructure and promoting non-fossil
fuels.
In short, they prefer the horrors of Trump to anything that
affects their sizable fortunes, even if it helps the country and most of its
inhabitants.
No comments:
Post a Comment