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In the final weeks of the presidential campaign, major newspapers are giving former President Donald Trump’s federal criminal indictment for alleged crimes related to the January 6 insurrection a fraction of the coverage they gave former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server in 2016, according to a new Media Matters study. Media Matters reviewed print coverage in five newspapers — Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post — for stories mentioning Trump’s indictment in the week following U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan’s October 2 unsealing of special counsel Jack Smith’s latest filing, which reveals damning new evidence of the former president’s alleged crimes. We found the papers ran 26 combined articles mentioning Trump’s indictment in the week after the unsealing of Smith’s filing. But those same papers published 100 combined articles — nearly 4 times as many — that mentioned Clinton’s server in the week after then-FBI Director James Comey’s notorious October 28, 2016, letter on new developments in that probe, as we documented in a 2016 study. The papers ran more than 6 times as many combined front-page stories that mentioned Clinton’s server (46) as they did front-page stories that mentioned Trump’s indictment (7) over those periods. Obsessive news media focus on Clinton’s server in the final weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign helped Trump to victory, even as Comey ultimately reconfirmed that no charges were appropriate in the case. But eight years later, with one presidential candidate facing active prosecution for federal charges related to his attempt to subvert an election, outlets are making different choices.
Harris picked up a flagged campaign from Biden after he shit the bed in the first debate and made a big fanfare of diverging from the current administration. For a week or two, people got genuinely excited. They started talking about student loan forgiveness again. They started talking about Single Payer again. They started talking about changing the course on our sponsorship of genocide in Gaza and our brutal treatment of refugees on the southern border and our inability to hit climate goals. They started talking about reversing out the increasingly fascist SCOTUS and restoring civil rights to our police-state of a nation.
Then Harris began to campaign in earnest. She leaned more and more on the Techbros for fundraising. She brought more AIPAC lobbyists in as bundlers. She weedled and hedged on climate change, as guys like Eric Schmitt outright announced AI was more important than cutting carbon emissions. She began rolling out arch-conservatives from the Bush Era as her spokespeople and major sponsors. Jeff Flake was the featured speaker at the national convention. Dick and Liz Cheney started showing up at Harris campaign events. John fucking Negroponte endorsed her. Harris went on the view and outright stated she’d be in line with Biden, with the singular exception of including more Republicans in her cabinet.
What does anyone think this is doing to her enthusiasm among base voters? That critical block of Muslim refugees in the Midwest she needs to win in order to hold those states… how are they feeling right now? The college kids who had their campuses raided by police at the end of last semester, how excited are they feeling right now? Folks down in Florida who just got their state sliced in half by a hurricane, how excited are they to hear a candidate say we need more emissions-belching AI data centers?
We know Trump’s ceiling from 2020. He pulled in 74M voters. He came within 40k votes across three swing states to beating Biden. And that was with a guy who was shoulder-to-shoulder with Bernie Sanders on election day.
Now Harris is playing footsy with the fucking Cheneys, Republicans so out of their element that they lost in Wyoming, as state that family practically owns wholesale. Absolutely clueless pack of fucking losers. If they cock this up, they have nobody to blame but themselves.