Thursday on NBC’s “Today,” former “Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw said Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s assertions of liberal media bias are unfounded because conservatives have “Fox News and a lot of other publications and social media.”
Partial transcript as follows:
SAVANNAH GUTHRIE: We’ve got Tom Brokaw here with more. Tom, good morning. We always kind of turn to you in these moments because you’re our resident veteran and historian. Can you put into perspective for people why that statement is such an earthquake?
TOM BROKAW: Well, at this stage of a campaign – we’re not even at the results yet – he’s already saying, “I may not accept the results.” This is not a banana republic. We’ve got more than 200 years of presidential elections and graceful and peaceful transitions to the new administration, as you saw, even Richard Nixon, Al Gore, the people who were caught up in very close races, said, “I accept the new president.”
His complaints have been, apparently, that he thinks there’s a media conspiracy of some kind. The media conspiracy consists of The New York Times printing his tax returns, in which he didn’t pay, it appears, any taxes after taking a billion-dollar loss. He had more television time than the GEICO gecko for most of the summer and his rallies were about him, and I think that, that probably affected his thinking. He thinks it’s going to be like that all the way through. The rallies and the early part of the primaries are the spring training. This is the general election, and that’s what we are talking about.
GUTHRIE: And we probably can’t find any presidential candidate in modern history who didn’t feel that the media was definitely stacked against that candidate.
BROKAW: No, no. Absolutely true. And especially on the Republican side, they always feel that there’s a liberal media. But that – the fact of the matter is you have Fox News and a lot of other publications and social media, which has become very, very important in this process.
(h/t MRC)
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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