When a new Fox News Latino poll showed some dismal results for Donald Trump, Fox’s Happening Now show just happened to follow that with “questions” about whether the media has been “beating Trump down in the polls.”
I guess there were not a lot of ways to sugar coat the poll’s findings: Registered Latino voters prefer Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, 66%-20%. That’s a seven-point swing in Clinton’s favor since May, when the spread was 62%-23%. Trump's “unfavorable” rating has gone from 74% to 82%.
Obviously, Trump’s claim that he’ll win the “Hispinic” vote is not working out so well for him.
These numbers “could have big implications for Mr. Trump,” Fox’s Bryan Llenas reported. “With Arizona and Georgia now considered tossups, the stakes are even higher” for Trump in the battleground states such as Florida. And guess what? It’s not looking so good for him there either. 65% of Puerto Ricans, an important constituency, view Clinton favorably while only 12% do so for Trump.
So what a coincidence that Fox immediately followed such terrible news for their guy with something with at least the potential to make him look better.
In the segment that followed, host Leland Vittert said, “Donald Trump blasting the media for negative coverage of his campaign. There has been a series of missteps that has really captured the media’s attention and turned the spotlight away from the very real controversies surrounding Hillary Clinton.”
Got that? Vittert was trying to suggest that the media was obsessed with Trump “missteps” while ignoring Clinton’s “very real controversies.” Only a Fox News host would characterize a candidate’s suggestion that an opponent be assassinated and calling President Obama and Hillary Clinton the founder and cofounder of ISIS – not to mention his bigoted smears of a Gold Star family - as "trivial missteps."
After running through some more bad poll numbers for Trump, Vittert asked guest Judith Miller, “Is this causation, meaning the media is really beating Trump down in the polls, Judy, or is this correlation, that these things are just happening to happen at the same time?”
Notice how with either choice, Vittert was suggesting that the media was unfair to Trump?
Unfortunately for Trump, neither of the two guests, each a paid contributor, bailed him out. But it wasn’t for lack of Vittert’s repeated efforts.
“So many of his wounds are self-inflicted,” Miller said about Trump. She later said that there would be more coverage of Clinton’s issues if Trump would stop “getting in the way of the stories that would hurt her.”
Conservative Cal Thomas had similar thoughts. “Look, if you jump into a lion cage, you can’t blame the lion for eating you,” Thomas said, “and Trump throws all this red meat out at the journalists and he’s inviting them to attack him.”
Watch it above, from the August 12 Happening Now.
Crossposted at News Hounds.
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