Confirmation Bias in Political Communication

Keep your friends close & your enemies closer

In the past few days, 464 documents from the Clinton presidential library were released to the public. No, these documents don’t pertain to the email or Benghazi controversies. Surprisingly, they illustrate how Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, in their recent past, were better friends than they were enemies. This may come as a surprise to many being that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are at each other’s throats for the 2016 Presidential race. FOX News and CNN both describe the past relationship to be “lengthy and complicated.” 

Donald and Melania Trump on their wedding day in 2005 with Hillary and Bill Clinton.CreditMaring Photography, via Contour by Getty Images

Clinton and Trump are the front-runners for their respective parties and have habitually verbally attacked one another. “Her whole life has been a big, fat, beautiful lie,” Trump said about Clinton at one of his campaign rallies. “His trafficking in prejudice and paranoia has no place in our political system,” Clinton said about Trump during a Democratic presidential debate.

FOX News reported that the newly released documents illustrate that Trump had “manipulated polls in 1991 to generate interest in a presidential bit.” Stressing that the New York primary is days away, FOX News analysts suggested that these Documents could be of significant interest to Republican Presidential Candidates Ted Cruz and John Kasich.

CNN begins their report about the release of these documents by labeling the Presidential candidates as “political enemies.” Focusing more on how their past differs from their current state of affairs, CNN goes into much greater detail about the contents of these documents. Surprisingly, it seems as though CNN took advantage of these documents to bash the Clintons more so than Trump. CNN highlighted how Trump had sent several holiday cards to the Clintons with them never once sending him one. Although not detailed in the released documents, CNN, unlike FOX News, made note of a peculiar friendship between Ivanka Trump and Chelsea Clinton. The documents also revealed that Bill Clinton and Trump were once very similar, according to CNN.

Colored People Time

Hillary Clinton was recently criticized for a supposedly racist joke that NYC mayor Bill De Blasio made at her charity dinner event on Saturday night. After receiving an endorsement from De Blasio, Clinton told him, “...took you long enough.” De Blasio responded by saying, “Sorry Hillary, I was running on C.P. time.” Clinton soon clarified that De Blasio was referring to the acronym for “Cautious Politician” and not the assumed acronym for Colored People time.  Colored People time refers to the stereotype that black people are always late to events.

Hillary Clinton (center) made an appearance at the Inner Circle charity show in New York City on Saturday night with mayor Bill de Blasio (right) and Broadway musical Hamilton cast member Leslie Odom, Jr (left). Photo by Daily Mail

“That’s Hillary; always pushing the envelope comedy wise,” Tom Shillue from FOX News said. Prior to showing the footage of the event, Shillue made sure to label it a “comedy skit”. CNN gave no such label to the skit and relied on De Blasio to clarify that is was “clearly staged.” Shillue said that he has “never heard of that stereotype.” He immediately grinned and laughed after this statement. Diving deeper into the details of the event, FOX News showed De Blasio rapping on stage at the charity event. Shillue had several guests, including a black male, appear on his show to commentate about the controversy during which they casually made racist jokes and remarks. However, they appear to be ‘in the clear’ because the black male in attendance said that their comments “aren’t racist.” Overall, FOX News’s approach to covering the story was, in my biased opinion, very comedic and unprofessional.

On their website, CNN has a featured video story that begins with footage of the event and ‘joke’ in question; as opposed to FOX News’s comedic introduction. In CNN’s report of the controversy, they conducted a video interview with De Blasio in which he was asked, “do you regret going along with that joke?” De Blasio responded by saying that the event was “clearly staged.” In my personal biased opinion, CNN did a much better job at presenting the facts in a professional manner and confronting De Blasio himself instead of making assumptions.