Trump, Hillary or media - who's the biggest victim of US Presidential poll?

The United States presidential election has claimed three victims: Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and the US news media.

Trump has been shown up as a shallow, licentious braggart. Hillary has been exposed as conniving, dishonest and in the pocket of Wall Street.

But the biggest casualty in the 2016 US presidential election has been the American media.

Whoever enters the White House as the next president, there's little doubt that mainstream US news media has never before been so reviled and distrusted by the American public.

America's legacy newspapers and television networks have had a particularly poor election. Four media outlets stand out for staggering journalistic bias: The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC.

They have been right to ruthlessly expose Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's behaviour during the presidential campaign, his treatment of women and his business record. But as more and more respected voices in the US are saying, they have been professionally compromised by not applying those same critical standards to their reportage of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

The establishment media has glossed over her prosecutable breach of national security. As US secretary of state, Clinton used a private server located in the basement of her residence to send top secret classified emails.

Anyone else without her influence would have been prosecuted under America's strict national security laws. Several government officials have been for lesser breaches of security protocols.

While Trump's often outrageous behaviour is partly to blame for the hostile media coverage he has received, this election has severely damaged the credibility of the US news media. One mainstream newspaper finally broke ranks with the establishment media that has wilfully ignored Hillary Clinton's many sins while rightly pummeling Trump for his.

In a widely-read article by Kimberly Strassel on October 13, 2016 that has startled and shamed its mainstream media fraternity, The Wall Street Journal wrote scathingly of the dishonesty and bias that has scarred media coverage of the 2016 US presidential election:

"If average voters turned on the TV for five minutes this week, chances are they know that Donald Trump made lewd remarks a decade ago and now stands accused of groping women. But even if average voters had the TV on 24/7, they still probably haven't heard the news about Hillary Clinton: that the nation now has proof of pretty much everything she has been accused of.

"It comes from hacked emails dumped by WikiLeaks, documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, and accounts from FBI insiders. The media has almost uniformly ignored the flurry of bombshells, preferring to devote its front pages to the Trump story. So let's review what amounts to a devastating case against a Clinton presidency.

"The leaks show that the Clinton Foundation was indeed the nexus of influence and money. The head of the Clinton Health Access Initiative, Ira Magaziner, suggested in a 2011 email that Bill Clinton call Sheikh Mohammed of Saudi Arabia to thank him for offering the use of a plane. In response, a top Clinton Foundation official wrote: 'Unless Sheikh Mo has sent us a $6 million check, this sounds crazy to do.'

"The leaks also show that the press is in Mrs. Clinton's pocket. Donna Brazile, a former Clinton staffer and a TV pundit, sent the exact wording of a coming CNN town hall question to the campaign in advance of the event. Other media allowed the Clinton camp to veto which quotes they used from interviews, worked to maximize her press events and offered campaign advice."

Morning blues

Joe Scarborough is a craggy-faced man who appears every morning at six o'clock to co-host Morning Joe on MSNBC. Scarborough's co-host, Mika Brzezinsky, is an equally grim-faced presence. Together, every morning, they rip apart Donald Trump and sing paeans to Hillary Clinton.

Till five months ago, Trump was a regular guest on Morning Joe. The two men fell out and Trump hasn't come on the show since May 2016. Scarborough ironically is a former Republican member of the House of Representatives who has moved smoothly into a career on morning TV. His hostility to Trump is emblematic of how the Republican party has been torn apart by the billionaire builder.

House Speaker Paul Ryan (a potential Republican candidate for president in 2020) has distanced himself from Trump as the GOP finds its 54-46 majority in the Senate under serious threat in simultaneous "down-ballot" elections this November.

Trump has wounded both down-ballot Republican candidates and his own candidacy with behaviour that belongs to the Howard Stern radio show, not a presidential campaign. He still though has a devoted base of angry white blue-collar men with stagnant wages and deeply conservative evangelical Christians. They are horrified that four more years of Obama-like left-of-centre policies from Hillary Clinton will skew the US Supreme Court for years.

Following the death of Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court is delicately balanced 4-4 between the Left and Right. Scalia's vacancy will be filled by the next US president.

Unlike India, US Supreme Court justices don't retire at 65. They serve for life. The result is that the US Supreme Court changes ideological character glacially. It also means the average age of the eight serving US Supreme Court justices is nearly 70 with Ruth Ginsburg the oldest at 83.

Trump's base of blue-collar white men and evangelicals isn't large enough to win him more than 45 per cent of the American electorate. Despite the fact that Clinton is distrusted by around 60 per cent of the American people, she is therefore likely - bar a last-minute upset - to be the next US president. Her base of women, college-educated millennials, Latinos and African-Americans has given her a decisive demographic edge in the nastiest, most vicious, media-driven presidential election in US history.

So is it all over bar the shouting for "The Donald", as Democrats and their acolytes mockingly refer to him? Not till the Fat Lady sings - and we won't hear her till November 9, 2016, a day after voting, when all the results are in.

Meanwhile, the last of the three presidential debates on October 19 in Las Vegas will allow Trump a final throw of the dice in America's casino capital. The US mainstream media will be there to ensure that the dice doesn't fall into the right slot.