"Supposedly??" o_0 https://t.co/lY8QWco6G5
— Phineas Fahrquar (@irishspy) September 5, 2016
The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman penned an op-ed in which he calls out Donald Trump for corruption. And that’s fine. Goodness knows there’s plenty of fodder there.
But Waldman seems to be under the impression that if Trump is corrupt, Hillary isn’t. At least not nearly as much as Trump. You see, Hillary’s reputation for corruption is the media’s fault, or something:
The sheer volume of Trump corruption stories is incredible. They're all covered for a few days and then dropped: https://t.co/oM1BeVwcX9
— Paul Waldman (@paulwaldman1) September 5, 2016
Here’s the headline, by the way:
Waldman writes:
To repeat, the point is not that these stories have never been covered, because they have. The point is that they get covered briefly, then everyone in the media moves on. If any of these kinds of stories involved Clinton, news organizations would rush to assign multiple reporters to them, those reporters would start asking questions, and we’d learn more about all of them.
Asking questions, eh? You mean, like, “How was your Labor Day Weekend?” But we digress:
That’s important, because we may have reached a point where the frames around the candidates are locked in: Trump is supposedly the crazy/bigoted one, and Clinton is supposedly the corrupt one. Once we decide that those are the appropriate lenses through which the two candidates are to be viewed, it shapes the decisions the media make every day about which stories are important to pursue.
And it means that to a great extent, for all the controversy he has caused and all the unflattering stories in the press about him, Trump is still being let off the hook.
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Yes, it’s Trump who’s being let off the hook. Trump, whose every word and move is breathlessly covered by the media. Poor, put-upon, “supposedly corrupt” Hillary.
Ted Bundy's history of killing people is mind-boggling
So why does everyone give Jeffrey Dahmer such a hard time? pic.twitter.com/75jJ1xbsOv— PoliMath (@politicalmath) September 5, 2016
Newsflash, Paul: Nowhere is it written that two people cannot be jaw-droppingly corrupt at the same time.
The fact that Trump is corrupt in no way lessens the fact that Hillary is just as corrupt.
— Jeff McIrish (@JeffMcIrish) September 5, 2016
Exactly.
@paulwaldman1 One is not mutually exclusive of the other. Both have ethics issues. Both are unfit is a reasonable conclusion
— Thomas Fornash (@Tom4nash) September 5, 2016
@BruceBartlett @paulwaldman1 Might I interject. They both rot. Corrupt is corrupt. This has been a public service alert. TY
— Me&J Still #NeverTrump after all these years (@pattyjfitzes) September 5, 2016
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