Trump won because he ran incredibly effective political race: Analyst

Donald Trump won the 2016 US presidential election because the Republican nominee ran an incredibly effective political campaign, not because Fox News and other media outlets had built "preconditions" for his victory, an American political analyst and activist says. 

Myles Hoenig, a former Green Party candidate for Congress, said on Saturday Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton lost the November 8, 2016 contest because the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Clinton campaign “proved to be no less than novices at electioneering.”

Hoenig made the remarks in an interview with Press TV after Bill de Blasio, the Democratic mayor of New York City, blamed Fox News and The New York Post and their parent company, News Corps, for playing a significant role in Trump’s win.

Conservatives like to rail against the ‘liberal’ media

“Conservatives have railed for years against the ‘liberal’ media and liberals point to Fox as the preeminent right wing Republican Party’s medium,” the analyst said.

“On social issues, the media often takes a more tolerant position. It promotes stories of abortion rights, individual freedoms when attacked by the government, even gun laws that that 2nd Amendment advocates oppose. But when it comes to anything of a corporate, military, or Zionist nature, the entire mainstream media is lockstep in support of a very conservative agenda while aping the words of the State Department, Pentagon or their favorite political party,” he stated.

“One looks to NPR (National Public Radio) as an example of having a liberal and even leftist agenda. Yet the other day it did a story on the repeal of Obamacare, ACA, but from the perspective of the health insurance industry -- not the consumer, the patient. Any fair and balanced reporting would mention the fight for Single Payer, Medicare for All, yet those words seem to be banned from anyone’s lips at NPR. The corporate control of health care is what NPR promotes, like all the other networks,” Hoenig said.

‘Fox News didn’t pave way for Trump’

“Fox News did not pave the way for Trump, as de Blasio claims. It may have been his yellow brick road to the White House, but there were many other routes, all emanating from the same board rooms that promote war and capitalism,” Hoenig said.  

“Although some propagandists within the media, like [Bill] O’Reilly on the right and [Rachel] Maddow on the ‘left’, are more outspoken, incendiary and self-delusional about their objectivity, the networks they’re paid by might as well be members of the same country club, ‘smoking their fat cigars’ and drinking their martinis in the same club rooms together,” he stated.  

‘No mainstream US journalist will dare criticize Israel’

“On issues like Israel, you find far more dissent in Israeli newspapers like Haaretz than you would in the New York Times,” Hoenig said.  

“Israel has reporters like Gideon Levy who writes on behalf of those who oppose Israeli apartheid but there isn’t a single mainstream American journalist who would dare criticize Israel, thinking that their career would be safe. No politician would utter a word of condemnation of the intransigence of the Israeli government in seeking peace thinking his or her seat would be safe the next election cycle,” he noted.

De Blasio fails to see Democratic Party’s failings

“De Blasio is simply a traditional partisan politician. He will lay blame on any easy target that his base would agree with for their own [the Democratic Party’s] failings. Clinton did get more votes than Trump, but how many of those votes were out of fear of Trump, rather than devotion to the Clinton message?” he asked.

“Trump ran an incredibly effective political race and the DNC and the Clinton campaign proved to be no less than novices at electioneering. That is ironic as the Clintons and the DNC were effective in rigging the primary in order to remove the threat of Sanders re-directing the Democratic Party’s corporate positions,” the political activist pointed out.

“If de Blasio wants to lay blame on Fox for the Trump victory, that’s his right. And the more that people like him continue to lay blame everywhere else, the more irrelevant the Democratic Party will become,” he concluded.

Press TV’s website can also be accessed at the following alternate addresses:

www.presstv.co.uk