Courtesy of Pam Martens
The fact that the President’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty yesterday to an array of fraud charges and fingered the President as an unindicted co-conspirator in campaign finance fraud, which dominated cable news last night for a non-stop six hours, has failed to get front-page placement in newspapers across rural America. This news censorship may explain why suburban and urban voters give such a low approval rating to Donald Trump while rural voters continue to give the President high marks. Rural voters are simply being starved of important national news by their local newspapers.
Consider the stark difference in reporting between the digital front pages of big city papers and their rural peers this morning:
The New York Times leads today with the headline Cohen Pleads Guilty, Implicating President. The Washington Post has this: Cohen pleads guilty, implicates Trump in payoff scheme. The Los Angeles Times explains it this way: “For a president who campaigned on a platform of ‘drain the swamp’ and ‘lock her up,’ Tuesday provided a moment of reckoning that could put his administration in league with Nixon’s for the level of scandal that surrounds it.”
The Houston Chronicle wrote in a lead story that “Although President Donald Trump largely ignored it at a campaign rally in West Virginia, questions mounted about his possible legal exposure and political future.”
The New York Daily News and New York Post devoted the front covers of their newspapers today to the Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort news.
The President spoke at a rally in West Virginia yesterday, where he is popular because of his pro-coal stance. We looked to see how a newspaper in Clarksburg, West Virginia, the Exponent Telegram, was covering the Cohen story today. It had zero news on the matter on its digital front page. Its digital front page did have this, however: “Woman charged with disorderly conduct at Bridgeport city hall; later carried shouting off to jail.”
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