Hillary Clinton: Right still winning the message war

Hillary Clinton scornfully praised the “right-wing echo chamber“ for its skill in using Facebook and other media to dominate America’s political conversation and prop up President Donald Trump.

“I begrudgingly give them a lot of credit because they are shaping a narrative that is part of the messaging around Trump’s reelection, around people who challenge Trump, changing the subject all of the time,” the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee said in an interview that aired Sunday on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS.”

Clinton was responding to a question from Zakaria, who noted that on Tuesday the most-searched article on Facebook was a Fox News story about a judge granting a request from the group Judicial Watch for Clinton to be deposed over her State Department emails.

“What that said to me,“ Clinton said, “was here it’s Super Tuesday: The Democrats are trying to decide who they want to nominate against Donald Trump, the coronavirus is spreading — we now have more and more reports from different places in the country — but led by Fox News and Breitbart and others, it’s going to be about my emails — a totally bogus, finished, nonsense attack on me.”

She added: “They know how to deliver those stories through the algorithms into the feeds of millions and millions of people.”

In a 1998 interview, Clinton famously characterized as “a vast right-wing conspiracy“ the conservative opposition to her and her husband, President Bill Clinton. “Look at the very people who are involved in this — they have popped up in other settings. This is — the great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it — is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president,” she told NBC’s Matt Lauer at the time.

Facebook and Twitter didn’t exist at the time, but Clinton remains critical of the impact her political foes have had on society and the way they manipulate outlets providing essential information.

“They're not interested or even worried about Trump saying that the coronavirus is a hoax. They don’t want their listeners, their viewers, you know, the people that they're frankly feeding this other narrative to, to be focused on that,” she said.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/08/hillary-clinton-right-wing-facebook-123839