Speaking to Larry Wilmore on his “Black on the Air” podcast, CNN analyst Jeffrey Toobin apologized for his part in drawing “false equivalences” between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election.
“And I hold myself somewhat responsible for that. I think there was a lot of false equivalence in the 2016 campaign. That every time we said something, pointed out something about Donald Trump — whether it was his business interests, or grab ’em by the p–––y, we felt like, ‘Oh, we gotta, like, talk about — we gotta say something bad about Hillary.’ And I think it led to a sense of false equivalence that was misleading, and I regret my role in doing that.”
The Washington Post has more:
On the one hand, media organizations in the run-up to November 2016 exposed and covered the hard-to-count scandals and outrages that Trump had generated over decades as a self-absorbed real-estate mogul: the thousands of lawsuits, the mistreatment of women, the ambient lies, the racism, the stiffing of contractors, Trump University, the false promises of charity and much, much more. On the other hand, those same media organizations pounded away at Hillary Clinton’s email story. And many of them — CNN prominently included — gave Trump generous helpings of airtime for the rallies early in his campaign.
A study by Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy found that in the campaign’s final months, the media’s aggregate coverage performed pretty much as Toobin described to Wilmore. “When journalists can’t, or won’t, distinguish between allegations directed at the Trump Foundation and those directed at the Clinton Foundation, there’s something seriously amiss. And false equivalencies are developing on a grand scale as a result of relentlessly negative news. If everything and everyone is portrayed negatively, there’s a leveling effect that opens the door to charlatans,” wrote Thomas Patterson in the Shorenstein study.
As we all know, the daily, incessant pounding on Hillary about her emails – when nothing illegal had been found despite several congressional investigations – helped push her numbers down.
As well, unfounded allegations about the Clintons somehow making money from the Uranium One deal which, in truth, was approved by not Hillary but nine different agencies unanimously. The Clintons take no money from anything related to the Clinton Foundation.
But if you keep repeating what Hillary haters want to hear like a used-car salesman, you see what happens.
Listen below.
