Impeachment has been a messaging disaster for the White House. Why won't the press say so?

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/12/22/1906979/-Impeachment-has-been-a-messaging-disaster-for-the-White-House-Why-won-t-the-press-say-so


Impeachment has been a messaging disaster for the White House. Why won't the press say so?
Eric Boehlert for Daily Kos
Community
Sunday December 22, 2019 · 10:30 AM EST


The impeachment of Donald Trump was always going to be a messaging war, and on paper it should have been a rout for Republicans. With his Twitter megaphone reaching more than 60 million followers, Trump should have been able to use his uniquely digital White House bully pulpit to sway the nation's opinion. He should have been able to use his regular mass rallies to convince voters that he did nothing wrong. He should have benefited from the nearly $20 million the Republican Party and aligned super PACs have spent on anti-impeachment television ads over the past two months. (“A rigged process. A sham impeachment. No quid pro quo.&quot He should have benefited from Fox News, which functions as a blind cabal of cable television loyalists, to effectively spin GOP impeachment talking points.

But despite all that mass media firepower, Trump and the White House have utterly failed to move the public opinion needle on impeachment over the past few months, as one-half of the country remains committed to driving him from office. It's even worse than that in terms of GOP messaging, because the percentage of Americans who support impeachment has actually increased 15 points since late summer, a huge bump given how polarized this country is.

So given all of that, why does the Beltway media maintain a myopic view on whether Democrats have failed to sway public opinion since the impeachment hearings began? Why, once again, is the news media giving the GOP a pass and insisting it's Democrats who face the burden?

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Today, more than twice as many Americans support the impeachment of a Republican president than supported the impeachment of a Democratic president two decades ago. And the press portrays the Trump impeachment as a political and public relations failure for Democrats?

More proof the messaging has been a failure? Republicans had set their sights on more than a dozen moderate House Democrats and targeted them with an intense media campaign built around an onslaught of TV attacks ads that ran in the districts of moderate Democrats. They were designed to make Democrats feel politically vulnerable and to force them into voting against impeachment. This, while the Trump reelection campaign has spent more than $2 million flooding Facebook with anti-impeachment ads. But in the end, virtually all the targeted Democrats dismissed the GOP's pressure tactics and voted in favor of impeachment.