Bill Clinton: Media Treated Obama Favorably Possibly Because of His Race

Timothy Meads | June 03, 2018 1:30 PM

President Bill Clinton sat down on CBS "This Morning" today along side his new co-author, James Patterson, to discuss their new thriller The President Is Missing. The story involves a president facing impeachment, which led to President Clinton giving his current opinion on the medi and his view on the ongoing Russian Investigation conducted by special counsel Robert Mueller. Mo Rocca asked point blank, "Do you think that the press has been fair to President Trump?"

"I think they have tried by and large to cover this investigation based on the facts," Mr. Clinton said. "I think if the roles were reversed – now, this is me just talking, but it's based on my experience! – I think if it were a Democratic president, and these facts were present, most people I know in Washington believe impeachment hearings would have begun already," the 42nd president replied.

"If there were a Democrat in power right now?" Rocca asked his guests

"Yes. And most people I know believe that the press would have been that hard, or harder. But these are serious issues," Clinton added.

Rocca then asked, "You hear from Trump supporters who say, 'You know, the press slobbered all over President Obama, he could do no wrong. And now this guy can do no right. What gives, that there's a kind of whiplash?'"

"Well, they did treat him differently than other Democrats and Republicans," Mr. Clinton replied. "That was the political press."

When asked to explain why the media favored Obama, Clinton said, "You know, I don't know. They liked him, and they liked having the first African-American president. And he was a good president, I think. I don't agree with President Trump's assessment of his service." (Emphasis added)

This is not the first time that President Clinton has noted the mainstream media's biased news coverage of Barack Obama. In the 2008 presidential primaries, Clinton called then Senator Obama's presidential campaign a "fairy tale." Clinton criticized the press for never taking Obama to task for saying he had better judgement than Hillary Clinton because Obama was the only one against the Iraq war from the beginning. This was not true.

“I pointed out that he had never been asked about his statement in 2004 that he didn’t know how he would have voted on the war resolution,” Bill Clinton said the days after his remarks. “It disproves the argument that he was always against it and everybody else was wrong and he was right. I said ‘So that story is a fairy tale,’ and that doesn’t have anything to do with my respect for him.”