Lincoln Chafee is deeply unimpressed with the press.
The former Rhode Island governor and U.S. senator said Tuesday that his experience running in the Democratic primary last year reinforced his belief that reporters are bad at their jobs, and that they are more likely to focus on petty nonsense than they are to address uncomfortable issues.
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For example, Chafee said Tuesday, his brief run for president reaffirmed media don’t want to talk about the war in Iraq, which he voted against when he was a Republican senator.
“I’ve really come … to understand that there’s a strange force out there, if you will, that the mainstream media, whatever you call it, but we got into the Iraq War and, for those of us that have questioned it and voted against it in my case, they don’t want us talking about it,” he said in a WPRO talk radio interview. “And I found that out in the presidential race.”
Though Chafee tried his best to get reporters to look at his long-held opposition to the war in Iraq, he was unable to get away from the fact that he promised during his official campaign launch to switch the U.S over to the metric system. Reporters and even late night comedy shows all got a good laugh out of the former governor’s expressed desire to change up the way Americans measure things.
On Tuesday, Chafee sounded annoyed that his dream for a U.S. metric system became a punchline in newsrooms.
“[Reporters] immediately went to trivial things like metric,” he said, “and during the debate they gave me eight minutes out of two hours. The mainstream don’t want to have a discussion about what happened with Iraq, and I kind of knew that going in and it was just reinforced by that experience.”
Chafee is not just unimpressed with how reporters covered the 2016 primaries and general election. He is also annoyed with how they’re covering the current administration.
“It’s just a full onslaught against [Trump], and I think it’s just kind of tiresome,” he said in reference to the press’ ongoing negative coverage of the Trump administration.
“He won. I didn’t vote for him, but he won. Let’s let him get his feet under him, and try to build a new administration and move on,” the former governor added.
Chafee voted for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in the Rhode Island Democratic primary. When it came to the general election, the former governor pulled the switch for Hillary Clinton, who voted in 2003 to authorize the use of force in Iraq.
