Each Convention had a Grieving Parent. Let's look closely at how Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump addressed their attackers.
Pat Smith spoke at the Republican convention. She is the mother of Sean Smith who was one of the four embassy workers who died in Benghazi. Pat Smith said she blamed Hillary Clinton, personally, for her son's death. Smith said that Hillary lied to her face about the cause of the attack saying it was stimulated by an anti-Muslim video when it was in fact, Smith said, a planned terrorist attack.
I watched and heard Hillary Clinton respond to this attack when Hillary was interviewed on Chris Wallace's show on Fox. Hillary expressed empathy and sympathy. She also disagreed with Pat's memory, noting that two of the other parents who were there in the room at the same time, remember it very differently from Smith and corroborate Hillary's version, that she described the cause of the Benghazi raid accurately.
Hillary:
Chris, my heart goes out to both of them. Losing a child under any circumstances, especially in this case, two State Department employees, extraordinary men both of them, two CIA contractors gave their lives protecting our country, our values. I understand the grief and the incredible sense of loss that can motivate that. As other members of families who lost loved ones have said, that’s not what they heard, I don’t hold any ill feeling for someone who in that moment may not fully recall everything that was or wasn’t said.
I believe my description is accurate, but you need not trust my description. Watch Hillary yourself. It's two minutes. You decide what she said and how she said it: Click here: It takes you to a Youtube clip of the Interview on Fox
As has now been repeated all over the media, Trump handled a similar situation differently, only this time Mr. Khan condemning Trump for his blanket distrust of Muslims, which would have included their Muslim son killed in action. Trump raised questions about the otherness of the Khan family. It was classic Trump: apparently unstudied, it reaffirmed his anti-immigrant brand, and Trump attempted to de-legitimize the attacker. Trump's genius is that he uses a technique that the media accepts as valid. He doesn't disagree with his critics position; he de-legitimizes the critics by attacking an element of their person. Lying Ted, Little Marco, Weak Bush, Crooked Hillary, and now Mr. Kahn, a Muslim who apparently/probably/maybe oppresses his wife by silencing her, and who, moreover, makes unprovoked attacks on Trump.
Thad Guyer, below says it was obvious that Trump was goaded into this attack on Mr. Khan. As I wrote yesterday, I am not at all certain it was self-destructive: Trump's "brand" is anti-outsider, a light form of white resentment xenophobia. Trump could have handled it like Hillary did, but did not. Hillary is empathetic and respectful and it is a mixed blessing for her. Some think diplomatic talk is "weak". Some read it as hypocrisy. Other critics describe it as hostile. This is not a big win for Hillary. Meanwhile Trump is bellicose and gets criticized for it, but it has its plusses.
Hillary is Hillary, Trump is Trump.
Meanwhile, Thad Guyer asserts in a comment that the NY Times has a liberal bias and that it is hurting the newspaper. I offer an alternative view.
1. The American population has sorted ourselves into political regions and neighborhoods. The Republican Party has claimed the rural heartland, the places where people farm and ranch and carry guns and have wells and septic tanks. Urban city people, with mass transit and apartments and row houses and pedestrian shopping is Democratic Party areas. The NY Times is headquartered in the centerpiece of urban America, so its perspective is urban. It may only seem Democratic because it is urban, with urban sensibilities and values.
2. The NY Times is chock full of Ivy League people. They think stuff that happens at Harvard and Yale and Columbia is newsworthy. The GOP, especially under Trump's leadership, is anti-intellectual. When asked about his foreign policy advisors and sources Trump said he does it himself. Trump is Andrew Jackson, the rural man of the people, who have risen up against the urban effete elites of the establishment John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay. We have been here before. The NY Times may only seem Democratic because it respects learned authority from educated elites and Trump is running against those elites. Trump in fact was Ivy League, but he describes himself as the scourge of Ivy League elites. Hillary is part of the elite education set. She vacations at Martha's Vineyard. Trump vacations in luxury golf resorts.
3. The NY Times is anti-racist. Hillary Clinton asserts that there is a lot of low-level endemic prejudice in America. Democrats assert prejudice is endemic. Republicans assert it is not endemic, but then appeal to it and exploit it. Tolerance and acceptance of a multi-cultural America is a matter of morality and faith to liberals. It appeals to their moral sense of fairness. Republicans care about fairness, too, but they also care about group identity and respect for authority. So liberals and authoritarian conservatives talk past each other, essentially missing each other's point. Liberals think that profiling blacks as thugs is morally wrong and assert that Black Lives Matter, too.. Conservatives think that it is high time white people express some pride and solidarity and that we rally behind police and military authority. The NY times considers anti-racism a matter of simple morality. The GOP, especially under Trump, considers anti-racism a matter of controversy. The NY Times may only seem Democratic because it is respectful of multiple cultures and diversity while Trump is openly disrespectful of foreign customs and persons (e.g. Mr. Khan).
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| From NY Times Employee Website |
The disparate reactions to their critics--Hillary with Mrs. Smith and Trump with Mr. Khan--demonstrate their different temperament and it helps explain why the purest example of the mainstream press, the NY Times, seems to lean Democratic. It only seems Democratic because it is unabashedly the voice of educated, urban, urbane, multicultural diverse America. And Trump has gone to war against that, with an army of approximately half of America's voters.
Thad Guyer's comments:
The New York Times and virtually all mainstream or “legacy” media have represented Trump as a cruel tormentor of Khizr Khan, the Muslim who told the story at the DNC convention of the death of his son in Iraq—the ultimate sacrifice. I view this frenzied media criticism of Trump to be preposterous. Had Mr. Khan just told of his son’s bravery as a Muslim American, and the heartbreak of his death, any attack on him by Trump would have been outrageous. The highly choreographed DNC convention and the Clinton campaign knew that Trump would almost certainly not stand idly by while Mr. Khan, functioning as a Clinton surrogate, insulted Trump as not having read the constitution, and having “sacrificed nothing” in his life. That insult was planned, vetted, and utterly gratuitous to the father’s memorial to his son. In attracting Trump’s ire, Mr. Khan, the DNC, and Clinton campaign got just what they wanted—headlines bashing Trump. And everyone knows it. |
| Mr Khan on CNN, keeping the news on Trump, Trump, Trump |
The result is a further eroding of the legacy media’s credibility, the NYT in particular. In a controversial opinion piece, NYT’s new public editor, Elizabeth Spayd, called out her own newspaper’s obvious pro-Clinton bias with a variety of specifics. She says the perception of the NYT’s bias cannot be allowed to continue at the newspaper, because it is already driving away subscribers even on the left, and will undermine “the force of its journalism “. (See, “Why Readers See The Times as Liberal”, NYT July 23, 2016, http://goo.gl/f5Uyzm). Perhaps most significant, Ms. Spayd suggests that this anti-Trump bias may have already caused the NYT’s reporting to “miss ... the groundswell of isolation that propelled a candidate like Donald Trump to his party’s nomination” in the first place. Moreover, she says it’s not just the NYT with its core readers in their “giant liberal echo chamber”, but “part of a fracturing media” generally.
NPR commentators were not happy about Ms. Spayd’s wake up call. On its Sunday All Things Considered broadcast, The Huffington Post's Ryan Grim, and Politico's Susan Glasser strongly rejected Spayd’s criticism that it is the job of voters, not newsrooms, to “lean into” Trump. Glasser and Grim argued “readers know the difference between opinion and news,” and that readers cannot be warned too often that Trump is a “demagogue” who does not “follow the rules”, and that his candidacy must not be “normalized” by the media. (See NPR, July 31, 2016 “Evaluating The Media's Role This Political Season”, http://n.pr/2aqhgvn). As to readers knowing the difference between and opinion and news, Spayd was blunt: “I’m not so sure all do, especially when our website makes neighbors of the two, and social platforms make them nearly impossible to tease apart”.
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