Shilling for Trump
Today's News-Register editorial: Hillary's not president but she still needs to be investigated
From an editorial, "Investigate Clinton Ties to Russia, Too," in the afternoon Wheeling News-Register:
Take the big uranium deal a few years ago. It allowed Russia to gain control of about one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. The State Department - with Hillary Clinton at its head - cleared the takeover.
Then the Clinton Foundation received millions of dollars in donations from people who benefited from the transaction.
This one doesn't pass the smell test. For four years we had one congressional committee after another spend millions to investigate Clinton's role in Benghazi. If you ignore Fox News' hyping of the Benghazi story, they found very little. If there had been anything even remotely questionable about Clinton's dealings with Russia, it too would have been investigated again and again. Now that Trump is under scrutiny for his Russian connections, Hillary's dealings with that country have been resuscitated to give the Trump cheerleaders something to divert the attention of its viewers and readers.
Sean Hannity made a big deal of this last week on Fox; some of the other Trump justifiers have been saying this for months and now the News-Register has joined them. (Breitbart, for example, had three different stories about Hillary and Russia last week.) On the other hand, a search of more mainstream news sources yields very few stories. What does turn up in a search, however, is a number of fact checkers like Politifact which examined Trump's tweets on the Clintons and Russia. Wheeling "newspapers" ignore fact checkers so here's what Politifact had to say about this:
In his tweets, Trump mixed legitimate allegations that Russia meddled in the election on his behalf — for which there is significant supporting evidence — with unproven speculation that Bill and Hillary Clinton engaged in some fishy activity.
We counted six things Trump said that are inaccurate, exaggerated or taken out of context.
As to any deal with Clinton, they conclude after a lengthy analysis:
(T)here’s no concrete evidence those relationships or donations helped make the deal go through. Most of the donations occurred before Hillary Clinton could have known she would become secretary of state. And again, the secretary of state was one of nine agency heads that had input into the final decision, which ultimately lay with President Barack Obama.
(See also Snopes.com, another fact checking source, which thoroughly examined a claim very similar to the one made by the News-Register editorial. After a lengthy explanation, they conclude that the story was FALSE.)
A year ago, the Wheeling papers were barely onboard the Trump train. Now they ignore or downplay negative Trump stories on their front pages while defending him on their editorial pages. If they have to change the facts, so be it. They've clearly become a part of the far-right, pro-Trump propaganda machine barely indistinguishable from the opinions of the Breitbarts and Townhalls of the online universe.