Jason Cohen at the Daily Caller reported that CNN weekend host Michael Smerconish appeared on the Mediaite podcast to discuss "How Trump Beat the Media and Won Re-election." Host Aiden McLaughlin presented Smerconish as a "champion of moderation," which would certainly make you stand out at screamy CNN. He said all the media bias had a "boomerang effect."
SMERCONISH: I don’t want it all distilled into this one sound bite or conclusion, but at the top of my list, I’ll say it that way … It’s like a parenting lesson. The more that you tell people what they can’t do, what’s intolerable, you must not do this, you should not do this, the more they’re going to rebel. Maybe they would have ultimately come to their own conclusion and rejected Donald Trump. I don’t know.
But I think that the constant browbeating and the combination of the media influence and the four indictments, one conviction, and showing that God-awful joke from Madison Square Garden a week in advance of the election on a loop — and I felt it, and I said it, I can’t sit here, Aiden, telling you, well, this is the way I called the election, but I definitely felt the potential for a boomerang effect, and I think that came true. I really do.
McLaughlin agreed it was a "major repudiation of the media." Smerconish broadened it out to the lawfare. He said the "hush money payment case should never have been brought," with its "legal gymnastics" to stretch out the statute of limitations, which "poisoned the water and fueled the perception that this really was largely political, and it diluted everything that came after it."
Smerconish also criticized all the "fascist" talk late in the campaign. "If he’s a fascist dictator, and somebody working-class is supportive of him, is voting for him, what are you telling them? Then when President Biden said they’re garbage, it just brought it all home...I think that electorate was so disrespected that there was no way they were going to be told for whom they were gonna vote, and they probably came out more so than they might have."
