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The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg claimed Tuesday that President-elect Donald Trump won the election because the media failed to thoroughly fact-check him during his campaign.
As the show’s panel discussed the prevailing mainstream media narrative that “fake news” influenced the presidential election in favor of Trump, Goldberg claimed another contributing factor to his stunning victory was media complacency.
“There was no one saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute. That’s not true, you can’t say that,’” she said.
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Goldberg added that “one of the issues that Donald Trump seems to have with the media, that by the way for 18 months really kind of pushed him down our throats, because he was all you saw for 18 months.”
“[The country] elected the guy we saw every day,” she added. “That’s what people did. They saw that, they heard the lies. And nobody said, ‘Hey, that’s not true.’
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“So now he’s decided he doesn’t want to talk to the media because now the media is crooked again. So when he’s doing well, maybe the media is crooked but if he’s losing it’s definitely crooked and if you disagree with him you’re crooked, but the media put him where he is.”
Goldberg’s claim can be debunked by simply looking at readily available data.
Throughout the election, Trump was the target of negative news coverage — a fact that is even corroborated by left-leaning Politico.
Politico’s Hadas Gold reported less than two weeks before the election that 91 percent of nightly broadcast news coverage following the conventions was not only biased toward Hillary Clinton, but openly “hostile” to Trump.
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“A whopping 91 percent of news coverage about Donald Trump on the three broadcast nightly newscasts over the past 12 weeks has been ‘hostile’” to Trump,” Gold reported.
Gold cited evidence from the Media Research Center, which analyzed 588 evening news stories covering the election from Jul. 29-Oct. 20 on ABC, CBS and NBC.
Prior to the MRC study, columnist Brent Bozell wrote at Town Hall in June that the fact-checking organization PolitiFact showed a bias against Trump and Republicans in general. Up to that point in the campaign, Bozell wrote that PolitiFact rated 77 percent of the claims it analyzed by Trump to be false, but only 26 percent of Hillary Clinton’s statements were rated false.
A Quinnipiac University poll, released Oct. 20, found that 55 percent of likely voters believed the media was biased against Trump’s campaign.
