Hillary Clinton blames loss partially on 'propaganda channels' like Fox News, Breitbart News, and 'crazy InfoWars'
During an interview promoting her new book on the popular podcast "Pod Save America," hosted by communications staffers who worked in President Barack Obama's White House, Clinton said that her campaign was hampered by the "dedicated propaganda channels" on the right.
"That's what I call Fox News. It has outlets like Breitbart and crazy Infowars and things like that," she said.
The former secretary of state said that her campaign underestimated the adversarial media environment on the right, fueled by Russian interference and the spread of misinformation on social media sites like Facebook.
"We were late to that," Clinton said. "We did not understand how a reality TV campaign would so dominate the media environment."
Though the digital media landscape includes numerous left-leaning outlets, Clinton also warned that Democrats are "still going to face a very difficult media environment" in the future, and that they need to develop their own ideological media sources.
"We got to find a way to break through - obviously, more podcasts, more other ways of communicating so voices can be heard and real positions can be understood, is part of it," Clinton said. "But we're still at a disadvantage."
Throughout the campaign, Clinton largely eschewed Fox, appearing only a handful of times on the news side of the network during the campaign with hosts like Chris Wallace and Bret Baier.
Though Clinton singled out right-leaning outlets and conspiracy theorists, she has also criticized other mainstream outlets for their coverage of the campaign.
In her new book "What Happened," Clinton admonished The New York Times for its coverage of the investigation into her use of a private email server, which she argued dictated coverage for much of the media.
"The Times, as usual, played an outsize role in shaping coverage of my emails throughout the election," Clinton wrote. "To me, the paper's approach felt schizophrenic."