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Comment by chc | Hacker News Reader

Media bias? If anything, the media has been weirdly accommodating to Trump. Trump literally hides his tax returns and they just kind of go "Oh well, guess that's that," but they kept reporting on Clinton's emails ad nauseum no matter how many times it was established that there was nothing there. When Comey broke protocol and commented on her emails again a week ago, the story was not, "Look how the GOP is trying to rig this election with a false scandal," the front page stories were once again credulous acceptance that there was something fishy about Clinton. And when Comey once again failed to find anything, that was a much smaller story.

IMO the media's hunger to appease Trump is one of the most interesting contributors to this result.

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I agree. There's a big lesson in focus here. One side hammered the emails incessantly while the other had too many issues to get the media to lock down on one.

I tend to think that this was the meeting of three things:

  - media driven by drama
  - individual operating how they always have, unlike the norm
  - a populace with many negative feelings, reacting to both

Part of it is also that Hillary's emails was pretty much handed to the media, with very little work required from their part. Digging into Trumps taxes or other scandals would require actual work.

As for Comey, he had a lose/lose scenario. If he didn't go forward with the new emails, and it had turned out that there was actually something worth investigating, he's would have kept important information from the US public, just before an election.

While Trump perhaps isn't exactly the ideal candidate for the US presidency, I have the same take on him as I did on the Brexit: The world is simply to boring a place for this to become a major issue. In the long run everything will be fine.

It's only been about a century since the Great Depression and the World Wars. I think it's a little early to say tragic outcomes are off the table now.

True, but it also a little to early to assume that Trump will turn the US into a 3. world country. Most of the things happing right now is due to people panicking about a future that is now perceived as more unstable, compared to if Hillary had won.

It's my belief that most of the short term problems that will arise from president elect Donald Trump is because people make wild speculations, and less because of his actions.

>they just kind of go "Oh well, guess that's that,"

Because this is what the media does for damn near every political scandal that politicians don't immediately capitulate to. Weathering the storm of news, attention and publicity to a "scandal" when a story hits is how it becomes a non-story next week.

>they kept reporting on Clinton's emails ad nauseum no matter how many times it was established that there was nothing there

Because there were incremental changes and updates, the media gets to milk the story for every new morsel. Also, a sleazy, immoral and poorly implemented system for attempting to avoid (even without breaking) open records laws is not "nothing."

IMO the media's hunger to appease Trump

The media's actions are better explained as both lazy and desperate for reader/viewer attention. It explains everything they do from coverage of Trump and Hillary all the way to coverage of the Scout Bake Sale.

I feel they were biased in another, more insidious way (and they went along with it). Trump has carefully crafter a persona for himself over the years (perhaps even accidentally, by virtue of his personality), where he can pretty much say anything (and especially things no other candidate would ever be able to say without saying goodbye to any chance at election), and the media (and people) will just go "oh, well, sure he said some racist, sexist things, but that's just Trump... you know how he is". Kind of like that racist uncle at the dinner table... you gotta put up with it, but at least he's family, so you understand him better, and perhaps realize he has other redeeming qualities.

So, this has allowed Trump to appeal to bases of people no other candidate could even hope to reach, with the current "acceptable" rhetoric.

I can't believe that someone can come to the conclusion you just did. The media was overwhelmingly anti-Trump, that shouldn't even be in dispute. He may have "won" a few talking points that the media was forced to report on as you indicated, but to say the media was accommodating to Trump is just fantasy.

The people in the media were overwhelmingly anti-Trump, no argument. But the media's coverage of the election was not anti-Trump any more than reporting objective facts in the face of Trump's lies can be called "anti-Trump." They reported on Hillary like any other candidate, but they walked on eggshells around Trump, trying and failing to find a way to report on somebody they despised — and who constantly accused them of conspiring against him — without appearing partial. For example, there were way more stories about the how sketchy the Clinton Foundation was than the Trump Foundation, even though the latter has factually violated the law and the former has not.

Trump literally hides his tax returns and they just kind of go "we're going to break federal law to publish them"

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