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375 points begueradj | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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greatgib ◴[] No.45666908[source]
Something really scary in France right now is that you can see really clearly how most mainstream media are used for propaganda.

Since a few days, there is an abundance of cover and articles in most major newspaper here with propaganda and repeated lies supporting him. It's hard to imagine but non stop. You have everyday interviews of his family saying that it is an injustice, that he did nothing, that the judgement was rigged, that he was a great men that served France and so should not be treated like everyone else. Article about how sad the poor family is. Number of articles repeating friends of him verbatim s that the judgement was fake.

Almost none speaking about the facts, the grounds for his sentence, the big number of other trials against him that are running. And also the other definitive convictions he got. Like for attempting to bribe a head prosecutor to get insider info about his case. Using a prepaid line opened with a fake name...

But what you see in the end is that 90% of medias in France belongs to a few wealthy families that are friends with him.

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add-sub-mul-div ◴[] No.45669600[source]
If you think that's scary, imagine a country where the corrupt ex-president doesn't even go to jail at all.
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1. FridayoLeary ◴[] No.45671288[source]
Imagine a country where every level of the judiciary and law enforcement is used to persecute a president, with cases so weak that they fall apart on their own, or are so obviously politicised it turns everyone against said systems, even if there is substance to the claims. But he still wins the popular vote, because he is so good and everyone else is so bad.
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2. stickfigure ◴[] No.45671691[source]
Imagine a felon, convicted by a jury, claiming "the case was so weak it fell apart on its own".
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3. nullc ◴[] No.45675161[source]
A felon convicted of essentially same 'crime' his opponent in the prior election committed but was given a settlement and a fine instead.

Hilary Clinton funded the creation of the Steele dossier-- which was later shown to be generally false and unsupported-- but paid for it through one of her law firms and misclassified it as legal expenses in an effort to conceal its origins.

Trump was criminally charged with falsification of business records because he paid Stormy Daniels hush money (to get her to deny her earlier claim that they had an affair) via his lawyer, and classified it as legal expenses. A visible hush money payment would have made it ineffective, just at the Steele dossier being known to be a campaigned paid hit piece would have made it ineffective.

There are plenty of things to ding Trump on, but I think if you're trying to persuade someone that the legal system wasn't weaponized unfairly against him this is a particularly poor example.

Even an argument that the facts make him worse here (e.g. maybe you say concealing an accusation of an affair says more about his integrity than paying for a false report says about hers)-- wouldn't change that this is just not a good example.

Particularly because there was nothing unlawful about the hush money payment itself-- the crime was an obscure accounting violation resulting from it... and in any other circumstance nothing would happen at all or at most, as seen with Clinton, a nominal fine would result. Sure, it's true that random details (like what state the acts in) will often decide if an act is technically illegal or not, but that's hardly an argument for the fairness of the justice system or that it was fairly applied to him.

I don't even hope to convince you of this-- but only to convince you that your example is unlikely to convince others, and is easily exploited to wrongfully convince people opposite your intentions.