Media, Pollsters Helped Cost Clinton the Presidency

Jack O'Dwyer

Ferocious, unfair media attacks on Donald Trump coupled with wrongful estimates of Hillary Clinton’s appeal to voters undermined her quest to be the first woman president. Many women thought there was no need to vote!

Obama won 55% of women’s votes in 2012 while Clinton won 54% in 2016 even though the stakes in 2016 were incredibly high--electing the first woman president.

Lulling women into a false sense of security was The New York Times, which as late as Tuesday, Nov. 8, before the voting began, said there was an 84% chance that Clinton would win. Other pollsters said the same.

This was after FBI director James Comey suddenly revived charges that Clinton had compromised national security by sloppy handling of government emails. The doubts raised by Comey were “groundless, baseless, proven to be [and] stopped our momentum,” said Clinton.

NYT “demonized Trump from start to finish,” wrote New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin Nov. 12, perhaps inspiring a backlash. NYT then made an “extraordinary appeal to readers to stand by” the paper, said Goodwin.

Sulzberger

Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.’s letter, said Goodwin, was “part apology and part defense of its campaign coverage” accompanied by a rededication to “the fundamental mission of Times journalism…to report America and the world honestly.”

The half-baked “apology,” noting other media were also duped, was as follows: “After such an erratic and unpredictable election there are inevitable questions: Did Trump’s sheer unconventionality lead us and other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters?”

NYT suddenly hides behind “other news outlets.” Oh, we were all duped. It’s not NYT’s fault.

“Virtually every so-called news article (in NYT) reflected a clear bias against Trump in favor of Clinton,” wrote Goodwin. “Stories, photos, headlines placement in the paper—all the tools were used to pick a president and the facts be damned.”

NYT Should Go Into Editorial Receivership

The family-dominated NYT, now in the fifth generation of Sulzbergers, is beginning to recall the Hapsburgs, whose inbreeding resulted in physical and mental abnormalities. The front page NYT Oct. 19 story notes that one of new deputy editor A.G. Sulzberger’s problems is that “a downsizing of the newsroom looms early next year, stirring anxiety among reporters.” NYT last year unloaded 100 or so reporters.

Goodwin’s advice is that the paper “enlarge its thinking about diversity to include journalists who disagree with the Times’ embedded liberal slant.”

That would be putting a Band-Aid on a gaping, life-threatening wound. NYT needs a new corporate board that will include not only middle and right-wing journalists but leaders of the Family Research Council and similar groups, union leaders, religious leaders, minority group leaders, and leaders of gay and lesbian groups. No one from the Sulzberger family nor executive editor Dean Baquet should be on the board. Sulzberger and Baquet spoke at Hunter College June 15, 2015. Press questions were not allowed and only three from the audience.

Baquet

NYT’s warped coverage of election issues, including the false claims that Clinton was far ahead in the polls, shows that it has lost its mojo. An entire new blood supply is needed, not just a transfusion.

An illustration is its Nov. 11 story with the six-column headline: “Trump Win Seen as a ‘Devastating Loss’ for Gay and Transgender People.”

Quoted in the story that takes up the top half of the page are Jay Brown, spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, the largest gay rights organization with $38 million in 2014 revenues and net assets of $9M (EIN: 52-1243457); Mara Keisling, executive director, National Center for Transgender Equality, and Rea Carey, executive director, National LGBTQ Task Force.

The 2016 GOP platform is called “the most anti-LGBT platform in recent memory.” Michael Pence, Trump’s running mate, who has been named head of the transition team, is “one of the most ant-LGBT politicians out there,” says Brown. As governor of Indiana, Pence opposed gay marriage and signed a law making it legal for businesses to refuse service to gay and transgender people.

No Coverage of Family Values Supporters

While gay rights groups are quoted saying things such as, “All across America right now there are millions of people who are terrified,” a remark by Keisling, there is no story in NYT quoting groups and people who support traditional marriage and who were triumphant at Trump’s election.

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a Washington, D.C.-based group with $13M in revenues (EIN: 52-1792772), said Trump’s election shows that the majority of Americans do not recognize same-sex marriage.

“If the liberal press had bothered to listen to what voters believe—instead of telling them what to believe, this election would not have been nearly as shocking,” he said.

“Because there’s one overwhelming message everyone should have heard on Tuesday. It’s this: the media, the courts, and the Left don’t speak for the American people.”

Perkins

Perkins, who served on the RNC Platform Committee, said nearly six in ten Trump voters were swayed by the pro-life, pro-religious liberty planks in the platform.

Wilson Perkins Allen Opinion Research found that a year and a half after the Supreme Court decision legalizing marriage between people of the same sex, 53% agreed that marriage should be “between one man and one woman,” he said. Disagreeing were 37% while 10% had no opinion. The Perkins in the firm is Chris Perkins who is unrelated to Tony Perkins.

NYT Mystified by Hasidic Support of Trump

On the bottom half of the NYT page giving vent to expressions of disappointment by LGBT supporters is a story about the Hasidic community in Borough Park giving Trump 69% of the vote while New York City and New York State went overwhelming for Clinton. New York’s 29 electoral votes went to Clinton who received 4.1 million votes or 58.8%.

The obvious answer, skipped by NYT, is that “family values” are a supreme component of the beliefs of Hasidic and other orthodox sects in Borough Park including the Bobover, Belz, Satmar, Ger and Viznitz.

Public Broadcasting Service, in a film called “A Life Apart,” said “Hasidism stresses what have become known as ‘family values,’ for example raising large families, with lasting marriages.” Other sites, quoting Hasidim, say members of the gay community are urged to suppress such tendencies.

Supporters of “family values” got no ink in NYT’s election coverage.

Zelden Defeated Throne-Holst on L.I.

Another election we watched was Suffolk Rep. Lee Zeldin battling challenger Anna Throne-Holst, former supervisor of Southampton.

Zeldin, the only Jewish GOP member of the House of Representatives, defeated Throne-Holst by a large margin—59% to 41% in garnering 174,682 votes to her 121,682.

We were rooting for Zeldin, posting this comment on the Suffolk Times website:

As a resident of Westhampton Beach, I was disappointed that Throne-Holst caved to the East End Eruv Assn. by passing a measure in the last few seconds of the Aug. 25, 2015 board meeting without any public comment or prior notice. That was despicable and grounds enough for her defeat, in my book.

That ended a five-year battle with the EEEA against erection of an eruv Jewish religious boundary. SH lost the “sign” issue but is now abandoning its argument that eruvim violate the Constitutional ban against church/state entanglement.

The SH board voted not to appeal the June 30 decision by State Supreme Court Justice Joseph Franeti who ruled that since the “lechi” markers proposed for SH utility poles are “virtually invisible,” they are not “signs” and are thus not violations of SH’s sign laws. Ironically, the judge's decision made the eruv more visible than ever, a triumph of illogic over logic. Also, eruvim are highly visible on Synagogue websites.