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We had an item earlier this week, covering the New York Times article in which several reporters illustrated Donald Trump's mental decline using cold, hard statistical facts. This "sequel" item is rather less complimentary of the Times.
Yesterday, Judge Tanya Chutkan decided to unseal several exhibits in Donald Trump's criminal case, at the request of Special Counsel Jack Smith. That said, there's not actually anything new to note, as yet, as she agreed to stay her own order for a week, while Trump's lawyers ponder their legal options.
If you are a regular reader of The New York Times, or other major newspapers, you might not have heard about this new development. That is because they don't give Trump's legal problems all that much attention. At least, they don't give that subject as much attention as Hillary Clinton's e-mails. Media Matters just published a study on this question. Here are their results:
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The imbalance is pretty clear.
Note that, for purposes of this analysis, and to keep things relatively comparable, Media Matters looked at Clinton coverage from October 29 through November 4, 2016, and Trump coverage from October 3 through October 9 of this year. The reasoning behind that is that October 28, 2016, is when James Comey released his infamous letter, while October 2 of this year is when Chutkan unsealed the brief in Trump's Washington, DC, case. In other words, a comparison of the week's worth of coverage following an important information dump about each campaign.
We don't think that the imbalance in coverage is conspiratorial. Much of it is because shady e-mails are a simpler and juicier story than legal filings, which are rather more dry. We also suspect that newspaper staffs believe they erred in 2016, and have adjusted course in 2024, as a result. That said, whatever the reason might be, the fact is that Trump is getting much gentler treatment in 2024 than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. That's especially concerning given that Trump's alleged crimes are many orders of magnitude worse than Clinton's alleged crimes. (Z)