Neither Bill Maher nor Fareed Zakaria have had anything positive to say about the tyrannical GOP nominee for 2016, and for good reason. Fareed spoke with the Real Time host about the inexplicable survival of the worst Presidential Candidate in history. One would be justified to believe that all of Trump's racially, sexually, culturally, religiously and physically insulting remarks, or his penchant for war and torture, compounded with an obvious lack of knowledge on policy matters, just to name a few, should have ended his bid for POTUS.
Most recently, we can add the ever-growing number of cases of sexual assault. Yet the race remains within 10 points, some polls have Clinton only up by four percentage points. How did this happen? Who has allowed this man to get so many get out of jail free cards when he should have been finished as soon as he made the Mexicans are rapists and drug smugglers insults, amirite?
Bill Maher attributes this problem to our media's need to portray a false equivalency which they create and then characterized their reports as fair and balanced. Bottom line is that Hillary Clinton with all her negatives (media-driven) is NOT EQUAL to the swamp bottom-dwelling and morally bankrupt, Donald Drumpf.
MAHER: I think the media, you know, has been going downhill for a long time with notable exceptions but I think one of the big problems is that they confuse fair and balanced with false equivalency, you know he's not the same as Hillary Clinton. I mean Politico did a study of this of how much they lie. She lies about twenty-eight percent of the time somewhat or fully, which is about pretty good for politicians. He lies like eighty percent of the time. Like she lies less than most politicians; HE lies like more than anybody we've ever seen! He just says whatever comes into his head!
Maher just annihilated the idea that both candidates are equal and the choice on Nov. 8 is simply selecting the lesser of two virtually equivalent evils. The sheer quantity of lies told by the two candidates are so disparate, only a pathological liar, aka Tommy Flanagan, would find Trump's proclivity for lying to be attractive.
Bill Maher, like so many of the folks who have seen the once straight news delivery of Walter Cronkite's era , has noticed the damage a both-sides-are-equal portrayal of news causes to our society. The Fourth Estate is culpable for creating a climate favorable to a con artist like Donald J. Trump.
MAHER: I think it's the media's job to point that out I know he's going to stammer and yell and he does I saw that the last debate is like a five-year-old. I mean he was keep kept saying to the moderator 'she got more time This is what my sister and I used to do when we were literally toddlers! oh she could do anything she wants, I can't watch any of my shows!
The idea that this is somebody who they are seriously considering electing? Even if he loses, that is a depressing thought. But yes, I do think the media has to do a much better job of that, but again, his supporters and all the people on Fox News, they buy this....
The HBO host explains that a politically disengaged voter might say that the 8,000 horrific things Trump has done should evoke the same outrage as the emails, 'It's a wash.' That can only be rationalized by lending credence to the false pretenses these scandals are based upon. He asserts that the emails are just a big nothingburger, the Clinton Foundation, is, God FORBID! helping people get over diseases. The media has to take responsibility for that idiotic false equivalency. Trump's charity only serves Donald Trump.
MAHER: 'Fair and balanced,'they got that in their head, which they think means well I say this to this guy and I said exactly that to the other guy. But if one person is saying that the earth doesn't revolve around the Sun, you know the answer is not to give that person equal weight with that. Also I mean, come on, the media is rooting for a close race.
Is it a good idea to sacrifice our fragile democracy for higher ratings? Too many media outlets are so obsessed with profits, they believe it's an equal trade-off, and that couldn't be farther from the truth.
