
Lay down with dogs, get fleas…




Voters who spoke recently to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Matt Miller were adamant: President Donald Trump’s alleged racism is reason enough why he should not win re-election in November.
But they refused to apply that same standard to presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden when confronted with the former vice president’s history of racist comments.
As every press conference indicates, the mainstream media and President Trump have a rancorous relationship, but how deep does the press’ antipathy go? A recent study says lopsided coverage of the two presidential candidates is pervasive among all major media outlets.
According to the conservative Media Research Center, which tracks media bias, evening newscasts, which are some of the highest-rated programs on television today, have given President Trump 150 times more negative coverage than Joe Biden throughout this presidential campaign so far.
“From June 1 through July 31, the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts focused 512 minutes of airtime on the President, or nine times more than the 58 minutes allotted to Biden,” reported Newsbusters. “This is an even wider gap than the spring when Trump received seven times more coverage than Biden (523 minutes vs. 75 minutes).”
“During these two months, our analysts documented 668 evaluative statements about the President, 95% of which (634) were negative, vs. a mere five% (34) that were positive,” the report continued. “Using the same methodology (fully described at the end of this article), we found very few evaluative statements about Joe Biden — just a dozen, two-thirds of which (67%) were positive.”
In those same two months, virtually every negative story about Biden — from Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegations to his sharp leftward shift, to his apparent racial gaffes — was all swept under the rug or dramatically under-reported, even as the newscasts continued to negatively cover President Trump. The former vice president’s own policy platform, which includes massive expansions of government health care, education, and environmental programs, received just “a meager 5 minutes, 22 seconds of airtime, not one second of which included any critical analysis from any journalist.”


This is hardly the first election in which such “lesser evil” arguments were advanced. In 1988, it was a matter of voting for Dukakis, the right-wing governor from Massachusetts, to finally put an end to the Reagan years. After Dukakis lost to George H.W. Bush, the following election in 1992 became a matter of putting an end to the Bush years by electing Bill Clinton, whose right-wing policies cleared the path for Bush II in 2000. In 2008, the argument became the need to elect Obama, the “candidate of hope and change,” in order to end the disaster produced by Bush II, above all, the war in Iraq.
Obama continued the most right-wing policies of George W. Bush (with whom, by the way, he has established a close personal friendship), including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the overseeing of the Wall Street bailout following the 2008 financial collapse. It was the right-wing policies of Obama and the nomination of Hillary Clinton on the basis of a prowar program, glossed over with identity politics, that created the conditions for the election of Trump in 2016.
This act, in other words, has been played out before, and each time the result is a further shift to the right of the entire political establishment.


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