The biggest losers on election night were in the liberal media, an adjunct of the national Democratic Party. But the far-left “progressives” who had backed Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and then rationalized voting for Hillary Clinton lost big. Many conservatives in the media also look like fools.
The left-wingers who were humiliated include:
- Noam Chomsky, the Marxist academic, had come up with the idea of voting for Hillary as the lesser of two evils. He argued that, in competitive “swing” states, a “progressive” should vote for the “lesser evil” Democrat. This was necessary to stop Trump, he said.
- Jeff Cohen, a professor of journalism at Ithaca College, co-authored an article with Norman Solomon that echoed Chomsky and said, “…if we lived in a swing state, we would vote for Clinton as the only way to prevent a Trump presidency.” Cohen and Solomon were Sanders supporters.
- Michael Moore, the left-wing filmmaker, endorsed Hillary and screened his film, “Michael Moore in TrumpLand,” at a pro-Hillary rally in Michigan, a state that Trump won. Moore said of Hillary, “I think and I hope that she is a different person. She says she is. She’s adopted two-thirds of Bernie’s platform.”
- The Communist Party USA. On the eve of the election, in an article headlined, “Vote like life itself were hanging in the balance. It is!,” the CPUSA paper the People’s World told American communists: “You’re urgently needed to get out the vote for Hillary Clinton and the Democratic House, Senate and gubernatorial candidates in your state—especially because right wingers have been playing dirty tricks to suppress voting.”
Interestingly, the author of this CPUSA article was Larry Rubin, who declared, “In the mid-1990s I was a political appointee in the Clinton Administration, a speechwriter for the Department of Education. I saw up close how brilliant and knowledgeable Hillary Clinton is.”
On the Republican or conservative side of the media, the big losers include:
- Bill Kristol and Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard. Kristol had encouraged a third party challenge to Trump, while Hayes had written the article, “Why I’m Not Voting for Trump or Hillary.”
- George Will of The Washington Post had written a column, “If Trump is nominated, the GOP must keep him out of the White House,” which argued that “In losing disastrously, Trump probably would create down-ballot carnage sufficient to end even Republican control of the House.” In fact, the Republicans maintained control of the House and Senate.
- Charlie Sykes, considered the most influential political talk show host in Wisconsin, was a “Never Trump” activist who is now eating crow. Wisconsin went for Trump.
- Glenn Beck, who claimed that Trump was “unhinged” and a “sociopath,” said that “the odds are stacked against the Republican nominee” on Election Day. Beck said of Trump, “[A] sociopath is somebody who doesn’t really see the human experience in anyone else, and I haven’t seen that in him. I haven’t seen him deeply affected by the human condition in an individual.” In fact, as we noted in several columns, Trump tapped into the desperation of the forgotten white working class voters.
- National Review, which ran an editorial “Against Trump,” argued that Trump was “a menace to American conservatism.”
- Former Bush speechwriter and Post columnist Michael Gerson had insisted that Trump supporters “are encouraging an alternate and degraded version of the American story.”
- Post “Right Turn” blogger Jennifer Rubin was strongly anti-Trump and had argued that the “NeverTrump” Republicans had signaled to their own party “that it cannot expect blind party loyalty,” and that “Their higher obligation is to the welfare of the country.”
In a Wall Street Journal column back in February, Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard had predicted that Trump would divide the Republican Party, leading it to defeat. His column ran under the headlines, “Republicans Are Campaigning to Lose. The candidate brawls and party disunity are setting up Clinton or Sanders for a win in November.”
Now, in The Weekly Standard, Barnes has written a column declaring that Trump’s victory “was part of a broad Republican triumph.” He says, “Republicans kept control of the Senate, a feat that once had seemed impossible since they had 24 seats at stake and Democrats only ten. Trump didn’t split the party. He strengthened it.”
All of the editors and contributors at RedState.com—except one—also have egg on their faces. Erick Erickson, former editor in chief of RedState; Caleb Howe, Managing Editor; and Jay Caruso, Assistant Managing Editor, had all predicted a Clinton win with 48 percent, compared to 42 percent for Trump.
In order to make a dent in media bias, those of us in the media watchdog business will be watching to see if Trump follows through on breaking up the big liberal media monopolies. Another policy he should pursue is thwarting foreign ownership and control of the U.S. media.
Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org
