Following the recent reporting from major news sources about Donald Trump’s alleged sexual assaults against numerous women, he has railed against the media for colluding with Hillary Clinton campaign. In spite of Media Research Center data which shows how lopsided recent coverage of the candidates had been, CNN’s Brian Stelter denied any such effort by the media to sway the election on Reliable Sources Sunday. “This is not just false, it's ludicrous and it's damaging,” he complained.
“In Trump's world, journalists are really just Clinton campaign workers in disguise collaborating with her in an attempt to rig the election,” he said before questioning, “How do we prove that we are not all conspiring?”
The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan didn’t know how they could convince people and described beliefs of a colluding media as “absurd.” “Nobody is sitting in a room with each other and planning to, you know, do anything evil to a candidate. It's just not the case,” she explained. She even went so far as to say that there was no such thing as “the media,” arguing:
I mean, there are media outlets, there are newspapers, there are cable TV stations, there are network news, but there is no, sort of, little group called “the media” that gets together and decides to do terrible things to Donald Trump. How do you prove that? It's a reality check.
The strawman argument presented by Sullivan is just about as absurd as she believes Trump’s is about the media. The media doesn’t need to meet like a cabal to push an agenda. There are members of the media who admit that the industry is dominated by liberals. And the fact that most of them see the world through a similar prism means their coverage is colored how they perceive it.
Later on in the program, Stelter brought on The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald to discuss the WikiLeaks scandal and the flood of Clinton Campaign e-mails coming from it. Eventually, a skeptical sounding Stelter brought up a select set of e-mails that allegedly show members of the media cozying up to the Clinton campaign. He seemed to suggest that Fox News and others were making something out nothing, saying to Greenwald, “I’ve gotten the sense that they believe there are bombshells.”
Greenwald seemed to pop Stelters bobble by confirming the seriousness of some the e-mails. “Some of them are just normal standard back and forth jockeying between campaigns and journalists. Others though I think are examples of serious impropriety,” he said. He even described Donna Brazile’s passing on of a town hall question to Clinton and not Sanders as “journalistically unethical.”
The CNN host has chalked up his own list of arguable improprieties this election cycle. He didn’t bat an eye when Univision’s Jorge Ramos argued for journalist to toss objectivity out the window. Before the first presidential debate he demanded that Trump receive harsher treatment than Clinton from the moderator. He even attacked Associated Press reporters for exposing connections between the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton State Department. Obviously, Stelter’s claim that the liberal media does not aid the Clinton campaign is also “ludicrous,” or maybe he’s trying to land a spot in Clinton’s next media party.