In “Fail Stream Media,” RT America’s Alexey Yaroshevsky and Anya Parampil take a look at why the mainstream media failed at objectivity when reporting the important stories of 2016. While outlets from CNN to even Fox News called Republican Donald Trump “a clown” and “a joke,” they were also responsible for his meteoric rise to the White House.
Media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) looked at 128 front-page campaign stories by three major newspapers over the course of two months. Their analysis found that Trump got twice as much coverage as his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.
“The coverage did not focus on the issues much ‒ it covered less than 12 percent ‒ and the majority of it was campaign strategy pieces that really just focused on the horse race… who was teetering or who was gaining ground,” FAIR’s Ben Johnson told RT. “A lot of polling, too. That made up around 60 percent… which didn’t really tell the voters anything.”
Once Trump surprised the pundits and pollsters by winning the election, some news outlets, like the New York Times, issued a mea culpa. Others remained defiant, seemingly declaring war on the incoming administration. RT became a favored scapegoat, with some analysts (and even the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI) suggesting that the network had chosen Trump as its favored candidate ‒ even though “News with Ed” host Ed Schultz recorded numerous exclusive interviews with darkhorse Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, the same candidate ignored by the mainstream outlets.
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