Leave it to a media pro like Soledad O’Brien to call out her media colleagues for their normalization of Donald Trump’s hateful, racist campaign in a way that I’ve seen few others do. Speaking on CNN this morning, longtime CNN host O’Brien told CNN host Brian Stelter that the media have gone through “contortions to make things seem equal all the time” when comparing Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton.

Harkening to Hillary Clinton’s excellent speech calling out Trump's connection to the alt-right, O’Brien points out that Trump has “normalized white supremacy” and done it quite well, with the media deeply complicit in the act, and she offered a specific example:

“I’ve seen on-air, white supremacists being interviewed because they are Trump delegates,” she noted. “And they do a five minute segment, the first minute or so talking about what they believe as white supremacists. So you have normalized that.”

Then O’Brien calls out the media for their bogus attempts at creating a false equivalence:

“And then Donald Trump will say, ‘Hillary Clinton, she’s a bigot.’ And it’s covered, the journalist part comes in, ‘They trade barbs. He said she’s a bigot and she points out that he might be appealing to racists.’ It only becomes ‘he said, she said.’ When in actuality, the fact that Donald Trump said she’s a bigot without the long laundry list of evidence, which if you looked at Hillary Clinton’s speech, she actually did have a lot of really good factual evidence that we would all agree that are things that have happened and do exist. They are treated as if they are equal.” O’Brien insisted “that’s where journalists are failing: the contortions to try to make it seem fair.”

That’s exactly it. A well-known white supremacist comes on TV as a Trump surrogate, and the media fail to point out the person’s white supremacy ties and act like this is totally normal — a valid, reasonable mainstream point of view. So Hillary Clinton delivers a very detailed point-by-point list of all the ways that Trump is running a racist campaign, with strong ties to white supremacists. Then Trump does nothing more than yell “Hillary is a bigot,” with nothing of substance behind the claim, and the media treats it as completely equal and normal.

O’Brien says that the question that true journalists should be asking, but aren’t, is if Trump is “softening the ground” for self-identified white supremacists/white nationalists to the point where they feel so comfortable with their views being brought into the national discourse that they can do a five-minute interview happily on national television. “And the answer is yes, clearly,” O’Brien said. “And there is lots of evidence of that.”

O’Brien went on to observe that cable news is on longer being rewarded for covering the facts, and covering real news, but for figuring out ways "to really rile people up, make them angry and divide them,” because that brings in the audience, and she believes that Trump was “over-covered” by the media at the beginning of his campaign because of this point. Of course this is nothing new, but the media’s normalization of white supremacy certainly is.

“Now, it is ‘he said, she said’ all the time. We have lost context. We actually don’t even cover the details of something. We just cover the back and forth of it. It’s funny to watch if it weren’t our own country and our own government actually operating.”

Amen to that. Thank you Soledad!

Watch the video here: