The “Gotcha” Game- How the Media Controls Elections

Question- How do you know when a Republican Candidate has a reasonable chance of winning an election?

Answer- It’s simple…when the media starts asking the Republican Candidate “gotcha’” questions…

Regrettably, no media outlet- print or broadcast, is above playing the “Gotcha” Game, not even the supposedly-conservative Fox News Network. Going back to the early days of television, and the even earlier days of print journalism, the fourth estate swims in its own sweet sauce of bringing down candidates with whom they politically and philosophically disagree. It has gotten worse, much worse, since the election of Ronald Reagan- and with every election since, the inherent bias in the media has become more and more egregious.

It works like this… Candidate X declares his candidacy for the Republican nomination for the presidency. Based upon the candidate’s timing of the announcement, the candidate has a twenty-four hour window of intense media attention, which the candidate admittedly craves and seeks to milk to the fullest extent that he/she can. Then, one of two things happens:

If the candidate is relatively unknown, or does not engender much of a bounce in the polls, the candidate is largely ignored or, at best marginalized to the extent that he/she gets no attention unless he/she says something outrageous.

(or)

If the candidate is relatively well known, or engenders a substantial bounce in the polls, the media swarms around the candidate, pounces on him/her and starts laying interrogative land mines which, if stepped on, begin to destroy the efficacy of his/her campaign.

The process of candidate destruction is very effective and can make or break a candidate, long before balloting even begins.

Take for instance the very first question during the main event of the Fox News debate in Cleveland. Brett Baier’s question was so obviously pointed at Donald Trump, it was obvious that Fox News was participating in the “Gotcha” Game. Megyn Kelly confirmed this over-the-top bias, when she asked Trump about disparaging comments he had previously made about Rosie O’Donnell- which has about as much to do with prescient issues as the color of the tie he was wearing at the time. Fox News, often accused of being conservative, showed its true colors by deciding before-hand which candidates are acceptable to them, and which are not. Obviously, Fox News does not like the idea of a Trump nomination.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the second debate, hosted by CNN at the Reagan Library, was even more egregious…egregious against Trump, as fully eighteen minutes was devoted to shooting him with all types of interrogative poisoned darts by the CNN moderator, and egregious against the entire GOP field, spending much of the balance of time indirectly attacking him, or pitting one candidate against another, in an effort to make the entire group of candidates look like an eleven-member troupe performing a verbal version of a pie-throwing, slapstick farce. Admittedly, it’s no surprise that CNN would show its all-too-obvious bias against the Republican Party, as they would NEVER do such a thing in a Democrat debate.

Notice also, in both of these televised events, the grossly inordinate amount of time spent on some candidates as opposed to the other, comparatively-marginalized contestants, who barely registered themselves due to the lack of opportunity to speak at all- cases in point Scott Walker, Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and, to a lesser extent, Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, John Kasich and Chris Christie. All of these candidates were afforded only a fraction of time that was allotted to Trump, Jeb Bush and, in the second debate on CNN, Carly Fiorina.

This media manipulation is not limited to the televised debates- not by a long-shot. Take for instance the question posed by Chris Todd to Ben Carson, on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on September 20th. He asked Dr. Carson about whether or not he would support the presidential candidacy of a Muslim. This question, completely irrelevant to this campaign for its complete lack of a Muslim candidate, was an obvious attempt by Todd and his network, to create a controversy that does not exist, and take down the candidacy of an increasingly-popular candidate with whom they object, as if to say “How dare an African American run for office as a Republican?” Does anyone imagine that Hillary Clinton would ever be asked such a question? Now that Carly Fiorina’s popularity is surging, following her stellar performance in the CNN debate, they will no doubt do the same to her, all for having the temerity of being a woman seeking the Republican nomination- a Republican Party who supposedly hates women.

The message is quite clear: substantially rise in popularity, and show some promise as to the possibility of becoming the next president, and the media will absolutely destroy any chance of one’s survival. The reason that they don’t attack Jeb Bush is because he is the candidate who the media has ordained as acceptable, largely because of the perception, warranted or otherwise, that the country will not elect a third Bush to the Oval office.

The media has largely ignored Scott Walker. Couple this with his lackluster performance in both events, and the resultant drop in funding, led to his decision this week to suspend his campaign. Walker effectively took on the unions in Wisconsin, survived two recall elections, and was an early-on and odds-on favorite to be a front-runner. At both debates, and on the campaign trail, it was obvious that Walker was given about as much attention as an unoccupied bellboy at a five-star hotel. One down, others to go…

Essentially, the mainstream media WANTS either Donald Trump or Jeb Bush to be the eventual nominee, and there is precious little that any other candidate can do to change this paradigm. They want Trump, because of the delicious possibility that he will commit an over-the-top faux pas, and thus guarantee the election of a Democrat. They want Jeb Bush because of the perception that another Bush is one-too-many. For Fiorina and Carson, the media will no doubt besiege them in an obvious attempt to drive these two “outsiders” out of the mix. Promising conservatives, like Rubio and Cruz, will have to scratch tooth-and-nail to get any attention at all, because they have the chutzpah to offer substantive conservative ideas that fly in the face of Democrat dogma. This dogma, which purportedly advances the idea of a supposed correlation of intelligence and the degree of liberalism so espoused, explains why Ronald Reagan was and is portrayed as “an amiable dunce”, despite the fact that it was Reagan who stood down the Soviet Union, and why Barack Obama was and is portrayed as a political version of “the second coming”, while it is Obama who caved in to Iran- the worst deal ever struck by a US president.

In summary, when journalism, either in print or over-the-air, sheds the vaunted veneer of objectivity, and takes on the trappings of over-the-top advocacy, representative government is then perverted to the point of polemic pointlessness, and the potential then arises that such a form of government shall sadly be sacrificed to the effete egos of sanctimonious media malcontents.

-Drew Nickell, 22 September 2015

© 2015 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved