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(51,974 posts)
Mon Jan 29, 2018, 04:45 PM Jan 2018

toobin and the false claim of false equivalency

cnn's toobin is suddenly oh so sorry for his leading role in the horrendously biased media coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign.

he called it "false equivalency".

http://thehill.com/homenews/media/371221-cnns-toobin-says-he-regrets-his-role-in-pushing-clinton-false-equivalency

i call it complete and utter bollocks.

"false equivalency" generally involves covering a legitimate scandal or gaffe of one candidate, then finding a less important scandal or gaffe of the other candidate and implying they're comparable; on the same order of magnitude.

that's not remotely what they did to hillary.

the donnie scandals and gaffes involved bad business habits, boorish behavior, bigoted views and policies. most of it wasn't illegal, at least not specifically so ("grab 'em by the p***y" would be illegal, but we don't know of anyone he specifically did this to). coverage of actual possible crimes (people who said he sexually assaulted them, e.g.) was kept to a minimum.


but when they talked about hillary, it was almost always either emails or benghazi. while both of these were clearly fabricated nonsense scandals, the accusations were far more serious than anything donnie was accused of.

in the email fake scandal, she was accused of multiple counts of serious felonies involving mishandling of classified information, supposedly putting national security at risk. this is a huge accusation, especially for a candidate for president.

in the benghazi fake scandal, she was accused of i-still-can't-make-sense-of-it-something-something that led to the deaths of actual soldiers. again, a huge allegation against a candidate for president.


there was no "false equivalency" here at all.

there was massively biased coverage of donnie, most of it about his policies and his speeches and the topics he wanted in the media (even if it outraged liberals -- or perhaps because of this), and the lesser coverage of hillary usually focused on scandals of vastly bigger seriousness, and covered in a vastly more negative way.



was there ever any pro-clinton coverage outside of paid ads? i must have missed it. did anyone, at any time, look at the 100,000+ emails they sifted through for hints of crimes and say "damn, that woman sure worked her butt off!"

that sounds like a snark, but it's not -- they had access to more information than ever before about the performance of a secretary of state running for president and the only thing they could think to talk about was whether she should go to jail for missing a &quot c)" way down the email chain of one of them.


"false equivalency" my butt.

there was no false equivalency in any way, shape, or form. it was a huge promotional effort to boost donnie and a huge hatchet job to destroy hillary's career.

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