Propaganda For The People

Our late, lamented Democratic nominee for President has her own propaganda site now. It's called 'Verrit,' and it's structured to be a safe space for former Hillary supporters. There, if you are one of them, your world view will always be comforted, never challenged.

Consider this piece, titled: "Study: Mainstream Media Acted as Trump's Mouthpiece, Clinton's Foe."

That's right: the argument is that the mainstream media was in the tank for Trump.

The study counts mentions of scandals vs. policy for Clinton and Trump. There are a few problems with this method. I'll describe two.

1) Most of the time, the media coverage treated Trump's policies as scandals in themselves. He got a lot of coverage as to his immigration policies, for example: the tone of the coverage was that the policies were racist, and that only racists would vote for such a racist.

2) Clinton's second-biggest scandal according to the study was "the Clinton Foundation." But the Clinton Foundation wasn't supposed to be a scandal: it was her own chosen vehicle for presenting herself to the American public between the end of her tenure as Secretary of State, and the start of her Presidential campaign. She should have wanted the media to discuss the Foundation as often as possible, as it was the way she elected to present herself. If it was a scandal for her, it's because she ran it in a scandalous fashion.

To a lesser degree, the same is true of her biggest scandal: the email investigation. She didn't choose that specifically for the purpose of presenting it to the public as her chosen image, but she did choose that course of action in order to try to control her public image (and in spite of Federal records laws). But in the case of the Foundation, it's completely on her that the vehicle that she designed for presenting herself turned out to look so bad.