Is media bias helping Donald Trump? Coverage of the candidates' charities offers clues

[TomCADem]

The short answer is yes, that Donald Trump is actually a big beneficiary of media bias with the media happily to chase down every unsubstantiated rumor he starts while being intimidated from pressing him on stories that he himself instigates such as his flip flops on deportation.

http://www.oregonlive.com/today/index.ssf/2016/09/is_media_bias_helping_donald_t.html

Vox's Matthew Yglesias argues that press coverage of Trump and Clinton is not fair and balanced -- to borrow Fox News' phrase -- and that Trump is coming out the better for it. The argument here is that Trump, a natural showman, successfully spins bad press to his advantage, while Clinton, both less adept with the media and saddled by 25 years of scandals (real and invented) about her and her husband, knows only to hunker down, which only further excites reporters. Yglesias' example of this dynamic in action: coverage of the two candidates' charities.

Clinton, of course, has the Clinton Foundation, started by her husband, former President Bill Clinton. The Associated Press and other news organizations have taken a hard look at Hillary Clinton's staff emails and her official schedule and speculated that she granted access and favors to foundation donors while she was secretary of state. Washington Post opinion writer Paul Waldman argued that what the emails "actually reveal is that a few foundation donors wanted access, but didn't actually get it," but that's not the narrative that's seeped into the public's subconscious -- in part because Trump and his surrogates have harped on Clinton running a "pay-to-play" scam out of the state department, a charge for which they have absolutely no evidence.

So that's Clinton's charity. Trump, you may not know, also has a charitable foundation. But it's received very little attention compared to Clinton's.

We don't know a lot about Trump's foundation, but one thing we do know for sure is that it made an illegal campaign contribution to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. And that right after she received the contribution, her office dropped its investigation into Trump University.