Earlier this week, Matt covered claims made by Mark Penn, the former Chief Strategist in Bill Clinton’s 1996 Presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton’s 2000 campaign, and her failed 2008 Presidential campaign, that the $100,000 worth of Facebook ads used by Russia to try and swing the election truly amounted to no influence what-so-ever.
President Donald J. Trump weighed in on this fact last night via Twitter, asking whether or not any attention was being given to influence American media had on the election.
Keep hearing about "tiny" amount of money spent on Facebook ads. What about the billions of dollars of Fake News on CNN, ABC, NBC & CBS?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 21, 2017
Critics jumped on this claim asserting that Trump was somehow wrong for questioning the influence that potentially fake stories published by our own media had on the election.
Hillary Clinton herself has claimed that the mainstream America media actually helped Trump.
“Many in the political media don’t want to hear about how these things happened and how these things tipped the election in the final days. They say their beef is that I’m not taking responsibility for my mistakes — but I have and I do again throughout this book,” she wrote in her book What Happened?
But these criticisms lack any credulity. Several in depth reports by Media Research Center’s newsbusters.orgshowed that the press, while rightfully critical of Clinton, was even more so of then candidate Trump.
“We also examined the spin of campaign news from the end of the conventions (July 29) through the end of the campaign (November 7). Our analysts found 244 opinionated statements about Hillary Clinton, split between 69 positive statements (28%) vs. 175 negative (72%). Those same broadcasts included more than three times as many opinionated statements about Trump (820), 88 percent of which (726) were negative vs. just 12 percent positive (94).”
As the facts show, to claim that the media somehow helped Trump instead of Clinton during the 2016 election is ludicrous. Clinton lost because she is untrustworthy, plagued by scandals of her own making, and quite frankly just a bad candidate.
As for her former strategist Mark Penn, he appeared on Fox News’ Journal Editorial Report this weekend to further dive into the details of how little impact those Facebook ads actually had.
After all was said and done, only $6500 worth of ads were actually spent in swing states before the election by the Russians. In fact 66% of the $100,000 in total was spent after the election. Watch his segment below.