Hillary Clinton has criticised the US media over its coverage of Donald Trump, calling on the press to “get smarter” about holding to account a president who is a master of diversion and distraction.

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Clinton also offered a stinging rebuke of the Republican party’s base, saying it had become enthralled by the president’s “insults and attacks and entertainment and spectacle”.

“The Republican party has collapsed in the face of Trump,” she said.

Clinton also criticised Trump’s repeated attacks on the press, behaviour she suggested had echoes of authoritarian and fascist political leaders who erode faith in facts and evidence. She said Trump had proved himself skilled at “tweeting and insulting and dominating the news cycles” and said he was too often left unchallenged by the press.

“I believe that where we are now in the political cycle is that the press does not know how to cover these candidates who are setting themselves on fire every day, who are masters of diversion and distraction,” she said.

The former Democratic presidential nominee specifically called out CBS 60 Minutes over its interview with the Trump last month for not asking the president about a major New York Times investigation into alleged tax dodging in his family real estate empire.

“I have a high regard for 60 Minutes and for Lesley Stahl who’s a terrific journalist,” Clinton said, before noting there was “not a single question” about the New York Times story.

“So at some point, the press has to get smarter because that’s basically how most voters get their information,” she said, adding that often the quest for “balance” resulted in facts being relegated in favour of opinion.

“If you’re into both-side-ism – so, you know, on the one hand this, and on the other hand that – really there’s no factual basis, there’s no evidence, there’s no record. Everybody lies, everybody gilds the lily. It doesn’t really matter. That just opens a door to somebody like him.”

Clinton made her remarks in an interview with the Guardian shortly before the US midterm elections in which the Democratic party recaptured the House of Representatives and Republicans increased their majority in the Senate.

Her remarks – part of a series of interviews with leading political figures about the rise of populism, particularly on the right, in Europe and the Americas – took place before the CNN journalist Jim Acosta was temporarily stripped of his White House security pass.

Clinton said Trump was “quite a student of authoritarian regimes and how they manipulate and control people”.

“He is someone who craves dominance over any situation he finds himself in. He craves adulation, flattery, all of which fit the profile of leaders we can remember from the past.”

Clinton pointed to research into fascism by the former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright. She said the analysis had shown “various populist, rightwing, fascist, authoritarian movements and leaders destroy a common base of fact and evidence, creating an ‘alternative reality’.”

“One of the ways you do that is by consistently attacking the press. Now [Trump] doesn’t attack Fox News, because they’re like a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump and the Republican party now. So he attacks the press and the broadcast media that raise questions about him, that don’t give him fidelity and loyalty.”

She added: “That he was on the front page of the New York Times is more important to him that any substance because he thinks he can defeat substance, which he has proven successful in doing.”

Referring to the 2016 presidential race, Clinton said her Republican opponent “never was held accountable for anything that he said, at all … and whatever the insult of the day was or whatever the revelation against him might be, everybody moved on,.”

“There was no drum beat. It just didn’t happen, and so people did not know what to expect.”

But Clinton reserved her sharpest criticism for Rupert Murdoch’s US cable network.

“You watch Fox News, it’s always, ‘Something terrible is about to happen’, ‘Something terrible did happen’, ‘These people are doing all these awful things’. It is totally divorced from reality, but it is superb propaganda. I don’t know the best way to puncture that. You have to hope that reality catches up with politics and entertainment at some point.”

She also accused Trump of racism. “This is a person who believes in very little, but he does have visceral responses to what goes on in the world around him. He does have a strong streak of racism that goes back to his early years,” she said.

“I include his anti-immigrant tirades because he characterises immigrants in very racially derogatory ways, but he was Islamophobic, he was anti-women, he really had the whole package of bigotry that he was putting on offer to those who were intrigued and attracted to him.

“He was, from the very first day of his campaign, raising the spectre of criminal immigrants and the like. So the anti-immigrant piece coupled with things that he said, the kind of people who supported him, former Ku Klux Klan members and the like, the message that we called the dog whistle, was incredibly loud. It was: ‘I’m on your side because I don’t like the same people you don’t like. Or at least I’m going to say I don’t and that counts for something.’”