Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard escalated her criticism of the “mainstream media” with her campaign accusing major news outlets of harboring an “anti-Tulsi bias” and doing their best to “ignore or smear her” in an email sent to supporters that solicited campaign contributions for her presidential bid. The email’s subject line read, “Will you help us bypass the mainstream media?”
The campaign email Thursday specifically referenced Gabbard’s recent appearances on CNN’s “Presidential Town Hall” and “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” saying that she was “poised, empathetic, articulate, and gave voice to the American people’s deep frustration and exhaustion with the series of disastrous interventionist wars that have dominated the last two decades since 9/11.”
The email said there was spontaneous applause as Gabbard shared her views on war, but that support wasn’t reflected in the media’s subsequent coverage.
“But you wouldn’t know that she hit a chord with the audience if all you read was CNN’s coverage after the fact, which was full of the usual anti-Tulsi bias and attacks. And you wouldn’t know that she speaks for a majority of the country if all you listened to were the commentators and talking heads who tried to marginalize her message,” her campaign wrote.
“The mainstream media has done their best to either ignore or smear Tulsi. We need to get Tulsi on the debate stage so she can keep speaking truth to power. Donate $25, $10, or $5 to help us get to 65,000 donors and onto the debate stage in June,” the email continued.
“Let’s be real — we know what we’re up against. For the last twenty years, powerful self-serving politicians and the mainstream media have fed the American public a story about regime change wars in Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Tulsi is exposing this mainstream narrative as a lie.”
Gabbard is working to secure a spot in the Democratic primary debates — the first one is scheduled for June and will be broadcast on NBC, MSNBC and Telemundo. In order to make the debate stage, Gabbard needs to garner at least 1 percent support in three polls or obtain 65,000 unique donors, with at least 200 donors per state in at least 20 states, according to rules set by the Democratic National Committee. She’s wavered between zero and 1 percent in both national polls and those taken in early primary states.
Todd Belt, a professor and director of the Political Management Program at George Washington University, said Gabbard, in her attacks on the media, was employing a common political tactic.
“The use of victimization in politics goes back ages. This is something that is very, very common, and one of the ways that you inspire your followers is by stimulating negative emotions such as anxiety, fear and worry. And those negative emotions cause people to seek out more information and to become more politically active,” he said. “Unfortunately, our positive emotions about politicians are not quite as forceful as our negative ones. The negative ones really get us up off the couch and get us to take out our credit card.
“This sort of stimulus of victimization and finding a target and finding an enemy helps to coalesce the followers of the candidate. It makes it an us-vs.-them thing, it delineates lines and it creates a sense of a common necessity and common goal. So that’s what she’s really trying to do, and of course the reason is she wants to be on the big (debate) stage.”
GABBARD HAS battled media scrutiny over a 2017 trip she took to Syria where she toured parts of the war-torn country and met twice with President Bashar al-Assad, who has been accused of torturing and killing civilians during a civil war that has devastated the country. Both CNN and Colbert made Syria a key focus of their questioning this month of Gabbard.
Upon her return from Syria, Gabbard was criticized by groups such as the Syrian American Council for parroting Assad talking points and was peppered with media questions about who paid for and organized the trip. One of the trip’s sponsors, Bassam Khawam, later conceded that he and his brother had formerly been members of a group called the Syrian Social Nationalist Party — which, according to news reports, backed the Assad regime and has links to terrorist activities.
Gabbard later personally reimbursed the cost of the trip.
The trip has distracted from Gabbard’s campaign message of opposing “regime-change wars,” with questions continuing to dog her about her views on Assad, whom she has called a “brutal dictator.”
Colin Moore, director of the public policy center at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, said he thought there is probably an element of truth to Gabbard’s claim that she hasn’t been treated fairly by the mainstream media, particularly when it comes to suggestions that she supports Assad, something Moore called “perfectly absurd.”
HE SAID Gabbard’s more isolationist views on foreign policy, while resonating with many Americans, run counter to the consensus of the Republican and Democratic foreign policy establishment, making her vulnerable to attacks.
But Moore said he didn’t think Gabbard’s criticism of the media would help her politically.
“Going after the media in that way, I think, is just so associated with President Trump that it is really going to turn off Democratic voters, people who might otherwise be sympathetic to some of her other positions,” said Moore.
He added that there’s an irony to the situation. “The mainstream media in many ways created Tulsi Gabbard. She’s gone from sort of being a darling of national media … to attacking the machine that kind of created her,” said Moore.
Gabbard also attacked the media in a fundraising solicitation in February, accusing the “corporate media” of “doing everything they can to stop our campaign before it gets started” and media giants of being in the “pocket of the establishment war machine.”
