While the premise of tabloids costing Hillary the election is provably absurd and insulting to Americans, there is a point to Politico saying they did. The point they are really making is Drudge, Breitbart and Fox are tabloids. They are doing it under the guise of blaming tabloids for Hillary losing the election. The left wants to silence all opposition.
Read on…
Tabloids Cost Hillary the Election
Those of us who remember when Politico was a reputable news source mourn their new role as hacks for the left. This article by Jack Shafer is a perfect example. The claim is that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election because of “ambient” tabloids like the National Enquirer and their disparaging headlines.
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The Enquirer’s owner is a Trump supporter, one among very few who didn’t support Hillary. Shafer’s silly claim that they played a major role is condescending. How little respect he has for the average American who views these papers as humorous and entertainment while waiting on a supermarket checkout line.
The morphed photos and outlandish headlines put them in the outrageous category but Shafer says something quite different:
It’s easy to imagine that tabloids don’t matter; the Enquirer is a relatively small voice in the media kingdom, with a weekly circulation of only 342,071, down from the 5.9 million it commanded in the 1970s. But that misses the importance of the constant cultural background noise it adds to American life: There are 37,000 supermarkets in America, with an average of about 10 checkout stands each, and many stands feature a wire rack displaying the Enquirer, the Globe, often the company’s other tab, the National Examiner, and celebrity magazines. According to an industry study, American households make an average of 1.5 trips to the supermarket each week. Every customer passes by the checkout stand, which means that even people who never purchase a tabloid still absorb the ambient headlines, and those headlines can shape their view of the world.
These things are a joke but that wasn’t his point. Down in the article he gets to the sneaky, subtle comparison he wants out in the public domain:
The Left’s Art of Smearing
Finally, he gets to the real point. Hence, we have the following paragraph from Shafer’s article:
“Put them together with the Drudge Report, which has hyped Enquirer stories; Sean Hannity’s program on Fox News Channel, which touted an Enquirer story in the late days of the campaign; and Breitbart, which toes the Trump line, and you’ve got the makings of a new, all-American misinformation bloc,” he wrote.
Shafer would have the American people believe Fox News, Breitbart and Drudge Report are the same as the National Enquirer.
This is an arrogant distortion that Shafer thinks he can get away with selling to the average American. The only ones listening are the angry, “tolerant” left.
Hillary didn’t lose because she said half of America are “deplorables”, because of her pay-to-play charity, or the fact that she’s an eminently unlikable person who sold our uranium mine to the Russians. It isn’t because D.C. is a swamp of establishment cronies who she represented. The deplorable economy and bad trade deals couldn’t have a thing to do with any of this. No, it’s the tabloids, Fox News, the Drudge Report and Breitbart. They’re all in the same basket of deplorables.
They Learned Nothing After Losing in 2010, 2014, 2016
Will they never learn?
These are the tabloids that, for the left, are equated to a news organization, a news aggregate and a reputable right-wing news organization. Do notice below that the New York Daily News fits right in with the National Enquirer.
Let’s not forget Buzzfeed which published the fake news story about Trump and his team with the urinating sexcapades angle.
21 pictures that totally look like Donald Trumphttp://t.co/PX5wOBUPyY pic.twitter.com/599aIRyVgv
— BuzzFeed (@BuzzFeed) July 22, 2015
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