How False Equivalence Is Distorting the 2016 Election Coverage

https://www.thenation.com/article/how-false-equivalence-is-distorting-the-2016-election-coverage/

The media’s need to cover “both sides” of every story makes no sense when one side has little regard for the truth.

By Eric Alterman Twitter JUNE 2, 2016



"On March 15, Donald Trump won Florida, North Carolina, Missouri, and Illinois, dispatching Marco Rubio’s campaign to the ash heap of history and giving every impression that he had become the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee. Hillary Clinton also did extremely well that day, taking Illinois, Ohio, Florida, and North Carolina. The New York Times gave its prime spot—the top-right corner of the paper’s front page—to a story headlined “2 Front-Runners, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, Find Their Words Can Be Weapons.” Readers quickly learned, if they had missed it previously, that Trump frequently used words like “bimbo,” “dog,” and “fat pig” to refer to some of the women he didn’t like, and this had led to disapproval ratings among women that reached historic proportions. And what “weapons” did Clinton give her adversaries? During a recent speech in coal country, she had suggested that her support for sustainable, clean-energy jobs would “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

Surely, you get the symmetry: Trump employs sexist school-yard taunts to denigrate roughly half the people on the planet. Clinton bravely tells her audience something they might not want to hear in support of a policy with short-term costs for some but long-term benefits for all. Same thing, right? Just ask, as the Times reporters did, a spokesman for the “anti-Clinton super PAC” America Rising, who opined that Clinton demonstrated a “brazen disregard for the men and women who help power America.” So you see, “dogs,” “pigs,” and “bimbos” versus clean energy. Both sides do it.

From the earliest days of this campaign, Times reporters have been transparently eager to blame “both sides,” often regardless of circumstance..."

It is plain and simple fascism making false equivalency where propaganda has people losing any sense of morality or simple right and wrong. Evil is alive and well in America, and white nationalist have always been under the surface begging that political correctness and morality can be discarded and their hateful paradigm can be mined by politicians and special interests to attack morality. Evil is rampant in the American under belly and once this was immediately crushed, but now a leading fascist is appointed to the campaign CEO of a campaign has gone from dog whistle to just speaking out loud like 1950 Dixiecrats.......there is no equivalency.......this is evil vs good, and anybody who does not recognize the same has already gone over to the dark side.