A.G. Gancarski
On Tuesday, a couple of interesting emails went out from The Daily Caller. The leitmotif was an animus toward Jeb Bush.
One of the emails was their nightly digest, TheDC Evening, which offered a link to a piece entitled “Jeb Worked with Bloomberg amid $50 Million Anti-Coal Campaign.”
The lede: “Presidential candidate and former Gov. Jeb Bush got into some hot water recently over his past work with a foundation run by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg for its funding of Planned Parenthood. What went unnoticed, however, was that Bush worked with Bloomberg as he gave millions to environmental groups to take down the coal industry.”
When Bush served as a founding director of the Bloomberg Family Foundation, between the years of 2010-2014, Bloomberg gave $50 million to the Sierra Club for its “Beyond Coal” campaign, which has been instrumental in reducing the number of coal fired power plants used in the country in recent years.
Bush’s response to this charge, made during last week’s Republican presidential debate, is buried deep in the piece.
“I joined the Bloomberg foundation because of Mike Bloomberg’s shared commitment for meaningful education reform,” Bush said on Fox News. “That’s why I was on it. We never had a debate about the budget. It was presented and we approved it. Not item by item.”
The Daily Caller tried to get comment on the anti-coal initiative from Bush, but did not get it. Perhaps because the campaign knew a hit piece was coming?
The second Daily Caller hit on Bush came from a sponsor: Donald J. Trump for President.
While readers are urged to note “that the following message reflects the opinions and representations of our sponsor alone, and not necessarily the editorial positions of The Daily Caller,” the eroded wall between editorial and advertising seems uncoincidental in this case.
“In the face of this media onslaught,” Trump writes, “my poll numbers actually went up. I even pulled well ahead of Jeb Bush, the supposed ‘front-runner.’ Bush is a weak and ineffective leader who would merely preside over the continued decline of this country. If he gets the nomination, we lose in 2016. (Bold in original text.)
In the postscript, Trump levels a second volley against Bush.
“Jeb Bush just raised over $100 million from Washington insiders. His donors are not donating to me because they can’t own me,” Trump wrote.
Was there collusion between The Daily Caller and The Donald? Or is this convergence just coincidence? As ever in politics, the truth is told by the larger trend.
What is undeniable: on the same day that a sponsored message aimed for Jeb, the leading news story from the outlet hit the same target. In both cases, the message was the same: Jeb Bush is not conservative enough.
An interesting tack to take, while Rand Paul and others wonder whether Trump, the outlet’s sponsor, is even conservative at all.
