FiveThirtyEight: Media attacks won't hurt Hillary among Dems

[IceSpear]

http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/hillary-clinton-media-bias-email/

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Good to see Democrats won't be buying the right-wing media's anti-Hillary smears!

[IceSpear]

http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/hillary-clinton-media-bias-email/

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Good to see Democrats won't be buying the right-wing media's anti-Hillary smears!

Most Republicans seem to constantly fall for the the "I didn't do anything wrong, the liberal media is just out to get me" non-sense, so it shouldn't be any surprise that most Democrats seem to fall for the equally absurd "I didn't do anything wrong, the conservative media is just out to get me" version.  When politicians in either party face criticism, negative news stories, or become embroiled in scandals, one of the easiest and most reliable responses is to claim or imply that it is just part of a smear campaign by the right/left-wing media.  

In reality, the media doesn't have an ideology, for example I doubt most of the commentary by the talking heads at Fox (or MSNBC for that matter) is informed by any sort of genuine ideological conviction.  Certainly nothing beyond the generic "I'd prefer for this party to win, I guess" that most voters probably have.

The media doesn't have an ideology (unless you mean capitalism), but it does have a certain character. And conservatives aren't entirely wrong when they say that outlets traditionally labelled the "mainstream media", such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, and to a lesser extent network news (more years ago in the days of Cronkite, etc. than today) is much more culturally/politically alien to their POV than it is to the American center-left. Sometimes, that is more in evidence than others.

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I'd say Obama during his whole 2008 campaign (and to a lesser extent, 2012 as well).

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Well, the poll has shown that there is a significant audience that thought the media was too hard on Clinton vs. Obama in 2008, but that didn't affect the "media". There was a significant audience opposed to Bush starting a war in Iraq in 2003, but that didn't prevent the media, including "liberal" media outlets, from cheerleading for that war to start, and so on...

Hillary's comment about the vast right-wing conspiracy has nothing to do with this. She was referring to a network of mostly alternative media sources, such as talk radio, the National Review, etc. Emailgate was broken by the New York Times and is fueled by "mainstream sources." They, too, have an adversarial relationship with Hillary, which they, themselves, are the first, to admit. Confusing this latter adverserial relationship with Hillary's 1998 comment is to completely misunderstand the 1998 comment.

The media was pretty clearly with Obama for the entire 2008 campaign. It was more balanced in 2012. They gave Romney a lot of passes (for example, letting him get away with not releasing his tax returns is a big one). I doubt it's a coincidence that big business also switched from heavily backing Obama in 2008 to heavily backing Romney in 2012. I'd be willing to wager that's not a random correlation.

The pundits and the old white men that run the media have made it very clear that starting witch hunts against Hillary is still their favorite pasttime even two decades later. What the reason for that is probably varies. Some of them (particularly FOX) are just RNC shills. Others from the left (such as MSNBC) deeply dislike Hillary due to hurt feelings from 2007-2008 and don't want her to win. Others will want a competitive Democratic primary for ratings, so they'll try to drag her down. Some might just be jumping on the bandwagon since "everyone else is doing it". Maybe some are "persuaded" by their big business ties. Maybe some of them have mommy issues. Regardless, the reasons are immaterial to Hillary's campaign. Since they've clearly picked their side and lost any semblance of objectivity, they can't be trusted to moderate a fair and impartial presidential debate. It won't really matter in the primary since her opponents will be fairly irrelevant, but it could be problematic for the general election. I wonder how her team is planning to deal with that, and with a strategy for the media in general. If they're not thinking about that, they need to start yesterday. The media will be the biggest obstacle she'll need to overcome in order to win, particularly if the Republican nominee ends up being media darling Jeb Bush.

[IceSpear]

Anyway, it doesn't matter. Hillary won't win. I've just returned from the Washington Post comments section, and I could not find a single positive original comment about Hillary. I scrolled down until Internet Explorer stopped responding. Hundreds of comments. Not 90-10, not 95-5, not even 99-1 (as one comment suggested), but literally 100% to 0%. She'd be crazy to run. She'll be buried in the hate. Mark my words.

Well, there are a few points here. Right wingers flock to news articles about Hillary like flies on sh**t. Usually they get linked from places like Drudge and Breitbart. That alone probably comprises a very large amount of the commentary about Hillary even on "left leaning" sites like WaPo. For example, if you happen to stumble upon a top article on WaPo about Obama that happened to have been linked by Drudge, the comments will be overwhelmingly negative despite the WaPo commenters tending to be fairly positive toward Obama in general.

Secondly, the Democrats least likely to like Hillary (white men that are very left wing) are also the most likely demographic to bitch about her on the internet. How many women do you think comment on WaPo? On the Atlas, we have like what, 2 women? Hillary's core supporters aren't the type of people to bloviate about how great she is on internet comment sections (though I am an exception to this ).