NEW YORK ― Donald Trump adviser Cliff Sims launched the inaugural episode of a nightly Facebook Live broadcast by promising to give viewers “the message straight from the campaign.”
“You don’t have to take it through the media filter and all the spin that they put on it,” Sims said.
Instead, the Trump campaign provided its own spin, unchallenged, during a half-hour broadcast that included the familiar trappings of a news program but without journalists who actually report the news. The nightly broadcast should appeal to Trump fans who proudly distrust the “mainstream media” while reflexively believing a historically dishonest candidate and his paid political operatives.
Politicians have long used new technology to try getting around the so-called media filter and speaking directly to the American people, from Franklin Roosevelt’s radio broadcasts to the Obama White House’s reliance on social media. Trump, who is said to be considering a post-election media venture, has bragged that having his Twitter and Facebook megaphone is already better than owning The New York Times. It’s given him the ability throughout the election to attack critics and grab headlines.
Just as Trump ramps up attacks on the news media for his sinking poll numbers, adviser Boris Epshteyn described Monday’s show as a way of “bypassing the left-wing media.”
The co-hosts’ first guest was Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, who two hours earlier was herself complaining about media coverage on MSNBC.
During the 4 p.m. hour, Conway told MSNBC host Steve Kornacki that he needed to be “more fair” after he accurately pointed out that Hillary Clinton is ahead in all but a few outlier polls. She claimed Trump can’t get a “fair shake” in the media, and criticized the amount of attention given to 12 women claiming Trump sexually harassed or assaulted them, an unprecedented series of allegations made against a major party nominee.
Conway questioned whether “what’s passing for breaking news these days and goes on and on and on with endless coverage, particularly on the three major networks, is actually what Americans want to hear.” She said journalists, like Kornacki, were “cherry-picking what you think people want to hear based on what you want to say.”
For instance, Conway argued a Wall Street Journal report that Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s political action committee gave nearly $500,000 to the 2015 state Senate campaign of Dr. Jill McCabe, wife of then-associate FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, deserved “wall-to-wall coverage.” After his wife’s election, McCabe was promoted to deputy director and helped oversee the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email account when she was secretary of state.
While Trump seized on the Journal story Monday as evidence of murky Clinton connections, some media outlets looking into the claims found nothing scandalous. Kornacki, too, indicated he didn’t view the story’s findings as evidence of corruption. (Watch nine minutes in.)
The MSNBC host ran through the series of events and asked Conway if she believed “there was sort of foresight on the part of the Clinton campaign to enlist Terry McAuliffe to ask a political action committee to give money to a candidate whose spouse would months later be placed into a position of partial responsibility over an investigation that at the start of that campaign hadn’t even begun?”
“At least I got you to spend two or two and a half minutes on it,” Conway responded.
Kornacki said Conway’s framing of the story “sounds sinister,” but repeatedly challenged her as to why it supposedly is.
“You said it’s a big story,” Kornacki told her. “I’m asking you why it’s a big story, because everything I just ran through doesn’t sound like too big of a story to me. It sounds like something if you put it in a headline, it might be rough, but when you put the context out there, it’s different. So, I’m asking you, what is the scandal there?”
Conway revisited other claims against “Hillary Clinton and her ilk,” and questioned why Kornacki, and other journalists, are “deciding” and “curating what you think the news is for the voters.”
Of course Kornacki, and other hosts, exercise news judgment in deciding what are the most consequential stories of the day.
Around 6:30 p.m., it was Trump’s advisers deciding what story should lead their first broadcast. They went with the McAuliffe story. Co-host Epshteyn described the Virginia governor as someone who “shares very much in [the Clintons’] crooked ways” before turning to Conway.
Conway said the events in Virginia were part of a “pattern” with Clinton and her husband, who she described as “grifters and gifters.”
Unlike Kornacki, Epshteyn didn’t ask Conway for specifics as to why the state Senate donations were evidence of corruption. Maybe that’s because the co-host suggested himself that they were similar to “what the mob does.”
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.
