Pat Caddell, pollster:

“What [Clinton] is doing is trying to brand everyone as an extremist, versus her political class, what she would consider mainstream,” he said. “But voters consider it the political class that has screwed them.”
Caddell said this merely emphasizes that Clinton “doesn’t understand the country, and that she represents a political class – by the way, Democrats and Republicans alike in DC, the Bush legacy as well as the Clinton legacy people – who are all in bed together at maintaining an order in this country in which they benefit, in which the rules are different for them, as we have seen on the emails and others, and everybody else takes the hindpost.”

He included the mainstream media in that corrupt order, criticizing them for “no longer defending the people’s right to know, and investigating power, but serving as the outriders of the political class and attempting to suppress whatever news would be harmful, to the extent they can.”
Caddell said this bias can be seen in “how paltry the coverage of the email – or, if you want a better example, Hillary going back and having a gaggle with the reporters on the plane, which one of the papers described as a series of softballs tossed at her, and compare that with how they are attacking” Donald Trump.

“The problem is, if Trump understands how to control the message, which he has not shown me that he really understands yet, how to control it, all of that can work to his advantage,” said Caddell, “because he can put it into context for people, in which they are not stupid. They can see what’s happening.”
He cited recent Gallup polling that showed that “the press has hit its lowest level of confidence from the American people in history,” a finding consistent with what Caddell’s work with Gravis Marketing and Breitbart News has found.

“Both newsprint and television media are the same, at 21 percent confidence, almost at the bottom of the rating,” Caddell noted, comparing it to Gravis/Breitbart News findings that more than two-thirds of respondents no longer viewed CNN or The New York Times as “fair and objective” news sources.
“These numbers suggest to me that this is not about an attack on the media as individuals or just whining, which is always the danger in the past,” he said. “It is to elevate, as I was trying to say a few moments ago, the argument to an institutional critique of how they are abandoning their role, under the First Amendment, to protect the people, and instead are attempting to protect power.”