It's hard to watch the incessant gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Donald Trump trial in Manhattan without feeling like you're traveling in a time warp back to 2016. We're back reliving the "Access Hollywood" tape and talk of how Trump would have never been elected except porn star Stormy Daniels accepted a six-figure check to keep quiet.
The richest vein of hypocrisy on this adultery-mangles-electability question flows through the Clintons. Hillary Clinton appeared on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" to denounce Trump for squashing the bimbo stories. It was typically shameless. She said: "I think the defendant, the former president, knew exactly what he was doing when he went to such great lengths to try to squash, bury, kill stories, pay off people because he understood the electoral significance of them."
The cast of "Morning Joe" treated Hillary Clinton as a therapist for their Trump angst, and no one interrupted and asked about all the squashing, burying and killing of stories that Hillary Clinton engaged in when she and Bill Clinton first sought the White House in 1992. On the cusp of the Gennifer Flowers allegations breaking in January of that year, Hillary Clinton was telling Margaret Carlson of Time magazine, "My marriage is solid, full of love and friendship, but it's too profound to talk about glibly."
But after Flowers asserted she had a 12-year affair with Bill Clinton, Hillary and Bill appeared on "60 Minutes," and Hillary claimed women being questioned about their relationship with Bill were her friends. "We reached out to them. I met with two of them to reassure them they knew they were friends of ours. I felt terrible about what was happening to them."
Recommended
In retrospect, one can smell what Hillary was cooking. She was pressuring potential accusers to stay quiet, but pitching it on national TV as just chatting things over with friends.
One can only imagine how Melania Trump processed the Stormy Daniels tale, but paying a nondisclosure agreement isn't exactly maintaining your innocence. That's why the Democratic prosecutors in New York are pumping this out on CNN and MSNBC, every hour on the hour. The Left thinks those religious conservatives are bothered by this, and it (SET ITAL) should (END ITAL) cause them to vote for someone else, preferably that "devout Catholic" Joe Biden.
But Hillary has always waged war on anyone who would seek to damage her and Bill's future in politics, and the media have always gushed over her warfare. At the end of the Year of Our Intern in 1998, Time magazine was aglow. Reporters Nancy Gibbs and Karen Tumulty oozed that "as she pursued the private rescue of a marriage and the public rescue of a presidency, she was the one person who seemed to see the larger story and shaped its telling."
The "larger story" was the "vast right-wing conspiracy." In this election cycle, Democratic prosecutors lobbed 91 felony charges at Trump, and the networks largely refuse to even describe them as Democrats, let alone a vast left-wing conspiracy.
Time managing editor Walter Isaacson even wrote that they wanted to name her "Person of the Year" in 1998 for her, um, "dignity." That's how they describe Hillary lying for months that Bill didn't have sexual relations with That Woman. "Her strength and her almost surreal ability to assert her dignity were remarkable to some and mystifying to others."
This kind of copy is why most Americans don't trust the "mainstream media." They don't report stories as much as they "shape" them for the benefit of their political allies.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member