Some news organizations have beefed up their ranks with conservative voices since the 2016 presidential election, a response Hillary Clinton said is misguided.
“The cable networks seem to me to be folding into a posture of, ‘Oh, we want to try to get some of those people on the right, so maybe we better be more, quote, evenhanded,’” Clinton said in an interview with New York magazine published Friday.
Author Rebecca Traister described how Clinton’s “brow furrows” upon mention of climate change skeptics Bret Stephens and George Will recently joining The New York Times and MSNBC, respectively.
“Why … would … you … do … that? Sixty-six million people voted for me, plus, you know, the crazy third-party people,” said Clinton, who won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes. “So there’s a lot of people who would actually appreciate stronger arguments on behalf of the most existential challenges facing our country and the world, climate change being one of them! It’s clearly a commercial decision. But I don’t think it will work. I mean, they’re laughing on the right at these puny efforts to try to appease people on the right.”
Clinton also jabbed at The New York Times for recently launching a feature encouraging people to “Say Something Nice” about President Donald Trump: “I never saw them do that for me.”
Looking back on the 2016 race, Clinton said she “underestimated” the impact of WikiLeaks publishing unflattering emails from members of the Democratic Party. The U.S. intelligence community has since concluded that Russian hackers stole the messages.
Emails dripped out daily in October in a fashion that was “innocuous, boring, inconsequential,” Clinton said ― yet people “played like it was some breathless flash.” She said conservative media outlets amplified the contents of the emails, but added that the mainstream press played its own role in giving the documents outsize attention.
“Look, we have an advocacy press on the right that has done a really good job for the last 25 years,” Clinton said. “They have a mission. They use the rights given to them under the First Amendment to advocate a set of policies that are in their interests, their commercial, corporate, religious interests. Because the advocacy media occupies the right, and the center needs to be focused on providing as accurate information as possible. Not both-sides-ism and not false equivalency.”
Read Traister’s full piece here.
