Ban all Muslims. Kill the family of terrorists. Insults the disabled. Impose mass surveillance on Muslims. Ban the internet to “protect” our children, putting “wetbacks” in the desert. Trump has said so many horrible things.
Yet he’s surging ahead in the Republican polls.
Rand Paul, a relatively moderate Republican who seems to favor non-intervention abroad, no bailouts for private banks, auditing the Federal Reserve, rehabilitation rather than jail-time for drug abusers, and ending the militarization of the police.
Yet he is at the bottom of Republican polls.
For a politician, it seems there is no such thing as bad news; the more coverage he gets, no matter how horrible it is, the better he does.
That seems to be Trump’s tactic… and the corporate mainstream media has obliged him.
On the Democratic side, this promotion of Trump has coincided with a blackout on Bernie Sanders- a candidate who we have covered very often (together with Trump, unfortunately) due to his views on:
Big Banks, Prison Industrial Complex, Corporate Mainstream Media, Hilary Clinton, Big Pharma
In fact, in many cases the mainstream media has purposely chosen to ignore Sanders; a recent TIME reader poll had Bernie Sanders win Person Of The Year, far ahead of second-place contender Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai and third-place contender Pope Francis.
Scoring 10.6% of the poll, he was far ahead of Trump who only scored 1.8%- 19th place.
Yet Sanders was not even on the final roster for consideration of TIME’s Person of the Year. Trump was… though thankfully German Chancellor Angela Merkel would go on to win the title.
Eric Boehlert from Media Matters for America pointed out that “the network newscasts are wildly overplaying Trump, who regularly attracts between 20-30 percent of primary voter support, while at the same time wildly underplaying Sanders, who regularly attracts between 20-30 percent of primary voter support.“
ABC World News Tonight devoted 81 minutes to Trump’s campaign this year, while Sanders received just 20 seconds… Trump received 81 times the coverage despite the equal percentage of voter support.
Indeed, this media blackout was entirely predictable; Bernie is the only candidate to have directly challenged the corporate media– and it had at the time responded by literally censoring his words so that they seemed to support Hillary, their favored pro-establishment candidate for the Democrats. In contrast, Trump has had more coverage than he could dream of.
“The corporately-owned media may not like Bernie’s anti-establishment views but for the sake of American democracy they must allow for a fair debate in this presidential campaign,” Weavers said. “Bernie must receive the same level of coverage on the nightly news as other leading candidates.”
(Sign this petition by Sanders’ campaign to have the corporate media cover Sanders more frequently.)
Columnist Juan Cole goes as far as to suggest that Trump’s anti-Muslim blaming may pose a “danger to society”:
What better for corporate news. You pretend there isn’t a candidate in the race addressing growing economic inequality or the woes of the working class.
You put all the spotlight on someone who insults and even incites against Mexican-Americans, African-Americans and Muslim-Americans.
It is a tried and true tactic of the American business class to keep the workers and middle class divided by playing up minor ethnic issues.
The end result, however, is fire-bombing of mosques and attacks on minorities and other white hood phenomena familiar from past epochs of American history.
This is of course one side of the equation. The other is the minorities’ response… and the response to that response… and so begins an endless feud that will prop up ever-more divisive candidates.
To those who view Trump as an “alternative” candidate:
He’s only “alternative” because he’s doing exactly what the other candidates wish they could get away with.
Simply insulting everybody is no indication of honest behavior, and if anything Trump has shown a lot of political cunning by using the so-called Big Lie technique– Politifact illustrates this by showing that most of his controversial statements are mostly false or blatant lies- so many lies that are so large that people believe that they must be true.
Finally, he’s not beholden to the elite 0.01% only because he’s literally one of them.
Sources: Common Dreams, RT, TIME, USuncut
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