After Donald Trump echoed both Hitler and Mussolini in a Veterans Day speech, saying, “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” Republicans defended him with a "both sides" argument, pointing to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 “deplorables” comment. But Republicans didn’t need to work very hard to defend Trump—because the media wasn’t paying attention to begin with.
A new Media Matters analysis compares television and newspaper coverage of Trump’s Nazi-flavored pledge to exterminate his political opponents with Clinton’s lumping of “half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables … The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.” Clinton’s comment was big news. Trump’s, not so much.
The nationally syndicated broadcast news shows—“Good Morning America,” “This Week,” and “World News Tonight” on ABC; “This Morning,” “Mornings,” “Face the Nation,” and “Evening News” on CBC; and “Today,” “Nightly News,” and “Meet the Press” on NBC—spent a combined 54 minutes on Clinton’s deplorables comment in the first week after she said it. Those same shows spent a combined three minutes on Trump’s vermin rant.
In that same one-week window after each comment, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News mentioned “deplorable” or “deplorables” a combined 1,662 times as compared with 191 mentions of “vermin.” The discrepancy wasn’t all Fox News. CNN talked about “deplorable” 553 times and “vermin” just 70. On MSNBC it was 596 to 112.
The five biggest newspapers in the country—the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post—didn’t do any better:
We found that the papers ran a total of 29 news articles mentioning Clinton’s “deplorables” remark — 13 of which ran on the front page. Of those, 11 of the articles, including 3 of the front-page articles, mentioned the remark in its headline and/or lead. By contrast, the papers combined for just 1 print news article that mentioned Trump’s “vermin” comment, which ran in the interior of The Washington Post.
That Washington Post article was good. But it’s clear that editors were not prioritizing this issue.
There is no question, by the hard numbers, that the media is giving Donald Trump a pass. His dehumanizing rhetoric describing his political opponents as “vermin” that he will “root out” is a nonstory as far as the broadcast networks, cable news networks, and largest newspapers in the country are concerned. By contrast, a comment describing people who are racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, or Islamophobic using a term meaning “deserving censure or contempt” and “lamentable” was huge news.
There is no honest way to look at this and say the deck isn’t stacked against Democrats. Everyone at the media organizations included in this analysis needs to take a good hard look at what they’re doing.
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