On Sunday's AM Joy on MSNBC, as host Joy Reid held a discussion which tried to tie accusations of sexual misbehavior against big media figures like NBC's Matt Lauer with the dominant media allegedly being biased against Hillary Clinton, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin claimed that the media were not tough enough on Donald Trump, and suggested they could have done more to throw the election to Clinton.
Without offering any evidence that the dominant media skimped on informing viewers of sexual harassment accusations against Trump, Rubin complained that the media did not spend as much time reporting on Trump's sexual misbehavior as on Clinton's handling of classified information with her work email.
After the group discussed Lauer pressing Clinton on her email, host Reid turned to Rubin and posed:
There's just the level of disrespect for the opinion of women that's one level of it all the way up to the disrespect of women's bodies, you know, along that range, but is it too much to conflate those two things and say, "Wait a minute, this could actually swing an election."
Rubin suggested that the media could have changed the outcome of the presidential election if it had spent more time on Trump's sexual misbehavior as she began:
Well, I don't think it's too much to conflate it, and it happens also in what's not shown. If there was enough coverage of Trump's -- I don't even want to say "dalliances" because that sounds trivial -- but really predatory behavior with women which was known before Access Hollywood -- if there was as much coverage of that as it was of Hillary Clinton's emails, do we think the election would have come out the same? I don't.
She then complained that the media had allowed Trump's "normalization" as she continued:
It was the willingness to ignore -- say, "Ah, it's just about sex -- it's just about his private life -- it doesn't have any relevance" -- that contributed to Donald Trump's normalization which was, I think, the greatest sin of the media in the election -- treating him like a normal person running a normal campaign saying normal things. And the red light should have been flashing on, and they should have been investigating, you know, down to the 14-year-olds who he was ogling outside the Trump Tower, but it wasn't.
The Washington Post columnist concluded:
And part of that is because of these misogynistic men, and part of it is simply because there are not enough women in positions of authority. If you had more women at the top, it would have been less harassment, and it would have been more coverage in a more gender neutral way.
Before moving to her next question, Reid agreed: "You're getting amens from here."
