It was January of 2016. The presidential campaign was now on in earnest.
And Donald Trump stepped up to the plate to call out Bill Clinton as “one of the great abusers of the world.”
This stunned the press – and they quickly (amazingly) did their duty to educate the public on the Clinton record. Media Matters, headquarters of the Hillary obsessives, was outraged. Said Media Matters writer Eric Boehlert:
“ Trump rang a bell that the press loves to hear rung, and journalists sprang into action. The Sunday shows this week churned with panel discussions about the political significance of Bill Clinton’s distant private life. The Washington Post quickly produced a handy, “Guide to the Allegations of Bill Clinton’s Womanizing,” which included some second-hand allegations from nameless sources about Clinton’s private life from three decades ago in Arkansas.
Editors at the Wall Street Journal dialed up the 1990s Wayback Machine and quickly typed up an angry editorial condemning “Bill’s runaway libido,” while The New York Times’ Frank Bruni predicted the “Clintons’ marital psychodrama” could emerge as a major political story in 2016.
As I noted two years ago while Sen. Rand Paul amassed glowing Beltway reviews after he called Bill Clinton a “sexual predator” (the move was deemed savvy by D.C. pundits anxious to re-enter the Clinton bedroom), those kinds of attacks are like sending out the Bat-Signal inside the Beltway: It’s an electric transmission that the press simply cannot, and will not, ignore.
The bountiful coverage that Trump sparked with a few snide comments about Clinton highlighted the larger press phenomenon that fuels his campaign: Trump’s run is essentially being paid for by the Beltway press, which has rewarded him with unprecedented amount of media attention — free media attention. (Over the weekend, Trumpbragged that he’d spent almost no money on his campaign to date.)”
In other words the press was doing its job. It was accurately reporting what Trump had said about Bill Clinton – and Trump did it to refresh the public mind and those who were too young to recall that the first serious woman presidential candidate had a very serious role in enabling her husband’s tastes as a sexual predator.
This was way over the line for the selective moralizers of Media Matters. They would spend the year defending their obsession with Hillary Clinton by defending not only Hillary and Bill but rising to the attack on anyone who dared to report the truth of the pair’s boldly outrageous behavior.
By the end of 2017, with Trump finishing his first year and one sordid revelation of Hollywood sexual assaults after another tumbling into the spotlight, with added fuel provided by the Roy Moore Senate campaign and Al Franken’s caught-on-camera groping, Media Matters was well into a campaign of serious selective outrage when it came to allegations of rape and sexual assault. The main object as always: protect Hillary and Bill Clinton.
Question? Who pays for this kind of disgraceful behavior from Media Matters?