Media 100 Percent Against Donald Trump, Glenn Greenwald Claims
The U.S. media is essentially 100 percent against GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, journalist Glenn Greenwald reportedly believes.
The media is also making the same mistake, according to Greenwald, that their European counterparts made during the Brexit referendum in which most of the European Union-supporting elite press lined up with the losing Remain or Stay side while dismissing the opposition and the legitimate concerns of ordinary Britons.
Parenthetically, at a Jackson, Mississippi, rally tonight, Brexit champion Nigel Farage of the UK Independence Party (UKIP or Ukip) will share the stage with Donald Trump.
Now the founding co-editor of The Intercept and formerly with The Guardian, Greenwald is the prominent reporter who originally broke the domestic government spying scandal with his interview of Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker/whistleblower who is now in Russia.
The Brazil-based Greenwald expressed his view of the media bias apparent in the mainstream media while strongly rejecting Trump’s policies. Greenwald, who described Trump as a mentally unstable clown and idiot, is generally on the progressive left of the political spectrum, while Trump — a former Democrat and independent — in general can be placed on the center-right
Separately, according to the Conservative Treehouse website, the 2016 presidential election is actually a contest between the globalist “UniParty” comprised of Republicans and Democrats and the populist/America First movement represented by Trump and his followers, some of whom are non-ideological and/or new voters.
As alluded to above, in a lengthy interview with the liberal website Slate, Greenwald was specifically reacting to the media outrage, manufactured or not, that occurred when Trump (sarcastically, according to the candidate) in a recent press conference called upon Russian hackers to find more than 30,000 of Hillary Clinton’s missing emails from her controversial private server.
“OK, so, I am glad you asked about that because this is the conflict that I am currently having: The U.S. media is essentially 100 percent united, vehemently, against Trump, and preventing him from being elected president. I don’t have an actual problem with that because I share the premises on which it is based about why he poses such extreme dangers. But that doesn’t mean that as a journalist, or even just as a citizen, that I am willing to go along with any claim, no matter how fact-free, no matter how irrational, no matter how dangerous it could be, in order to bring Trump down…”
Great interview w/ @ggreenwald on the failures of our elite media, DNC, Donald Trump & Democracy: https://t.co/vxIjslIJzr
— The People's Summit (@pplsummit) August 15, 2016
Greenwald chided the New York Times and other outlets/pundits for suggesting that Trump actually wanted Russian President Putin to launch a cyberattack on U.S. government agencies to obtain the emails. “That is such unmitigated bullsh*t,” the journalist declared. “If he wanted to request the Russians to do that, why would he do it in some offhanded way in a press conference? It was a stupid, reckless comment that he made elevated into treason.”
When it comes to leaks of government information, it doesn’t matter who engaged in the hacking to gain access if the material is in the public interest, Glenn Greenwald also seemed to suggest in the Slate Q&A.
The media elite’s approach to Trump and his political movement is reminiscent of how the London-centric U.K. press underestimated the pro-Brexit vote, which came out on top in the June 23 referendum, he noted.
‘They all sat on Twitter all day long, from the left to the right, and all reinforced each other about how smart and how sophisticated they were in scorning and [being snide] about UKIP and Boris Johnson and all of the Brexit leaders, and they were convinced that they had made their case.t was constant reinforcement, and anyone who raised even a peep of dissent or questioned the claims they were making was instantly castigated as somebody who was endangering the future of the U.K. because they were endorsing—or at least impeding—the effort to stop Brexit. This is what’s happening now.”
.@realDonaldTrump touts #Brexit movement as he welcomes former UKIP leader @Nigel_Farage onto the stage at a rally. pic.twitter.com/k1ynwnQUUq
— POLITICO (@politico) August 25, 2016
Although Greenwald believes that Democrat Hillary Clinton is likely to be elected president in November, the out-of-touch nature of the media on both sides of the Atlantic is partially responsible for Brexit and Trump, he contended. “I think in general there is no effort on the part of media elites to communicate with those people and do anything other than tell them that they are primitive, racist, and stupid…of course those people are not going to be receptive to the message coming from the people who view them with contempt and scorn. I think that is why Brexit won, and I think that is the real danger of Trump winning.”
Read the whole Glenn Greenwald interview and draw your own conclusions.
Although Trump’s often over-the-top rhetoric has generated much negative coverage in the mainstream media, many would argue that the press traditionally seems to put the Republican candidate under far more of a fact-checking microscope than the Democrat counterpart in presidential cycles past and present. CNN, in particular, has been aggressive in this regard. Perhaps for this reason, CNN has fallen to third place for the third consecutive week among the cable news networks in prime time hours.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc9tXWZd5eo
As the Inquisitr previously reported, a CNN headline about Donald Trump’s outreach to the African-American community implied that black Americans and felons are one and the same.
Perhaps the difference in this election cycle is that a cartel, as it were, of pro-Ted Cruz conservative websites and pundits have also joined in presenting any Trump campaign mishap, whether real or imagined, in an unfavorable light.
Along somewhat similar lines to what Greenwald has articulated, pro-Trump New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin denounced the media this week for what he called in a subsequent FNC interview a single-minded assault on Donald Trump to help Hillary Clinton that reveals contempt for Trump voters.
“The shameful display of naked partisanship by the elite media is unlike anything seen in modern America.The largest broadcast networks — CBS, NBC and ABC — and major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post have jettisoned all pretense of fair play. Their fierce determination to keep Trump out of the Oval Office has no precedent. Indeed, no foreign enemy, no terror group, no native criminal gang suffers the daily beating that Trump does. The mad mullahs of Iran, who call America the Great Satan and vow to wipe Israel off the map, are treated gently by comparison.”
“If [Trump] is elected, everyone in the media will become journalists again overnight. Trump’s every word and plan will be questioned, challenged and scrutinized, which is the way it should be,” Legal Insurrection observed. “Conversely, if Hillary wins, nothing has to change.”
Do you think that widespread media bias is in play in the U.S. presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton with the media taking sides as suggested by Glenn Greenwald and Michael Goodwin?
[Photo by Rick Bowmer/AP Images]
