Anticlimax doesn't begin to cover it:
Maybe the Liberal Media won't screw the Democrat this time. Maybe people will learn to keep their eye on the ball. And maybe monkeys will fly out of my butt.
Last week, Congress received a brief, nine-page report from the State Department, which summarizes the department’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email account to conduct work business while she was secretary of state.
. . . The State Department’s report reaches two broad conclusions. Clinton’s “use of a private email system to conduct official business added an increased degree of risk” that classified information would be compromised. But “there was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.”
In 2016, the State Department’s inspector general also determined that Clinton’s Republican predecessors, Secretaries Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, also received classified information on their personal email accounts.
. . . Clinton’s use of private email was the sort of minor scandal that the public deserved to be informed about at some point during the 2016 election — after which the news cycle could move on to other, more important stories. But that sure as hell wasn’t how it was covered. Indeed, it is likely that Donald Trump is president today in part because of the press’s obsession with this very small story.
Months after the 2016 election, a team of researchers at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society set out to quantify which issues received coverage — and which issues were ignored — by major media outlets during that election. To do so, they read thousands of campaign-related articles in several major outlets, and counted how many sentences were devoted to various issues. The results are striking.
As CJR later summarized this research, the Berkman Klein Center “found roughly four times as many Clinton-related sentences that described scandals as opposed to policies, whereas Trump-related sentences were one-and-a-half times as likely to be about policy as scandal.” Indeed, emails so dominated coverage that “the various Clinton-related email scandals—her use of a private email server while secretary of state, as well as the DNC and John Podesta hacks—accounted for more sentences than all of Trump’s scandals combined (65,000 vs. 40,000) and more than twice as many as were devoted to all of her policy positions.”
Meanwhile, CJR researchers Duncan J. Watts and David M. Rothschild did a deep dive into how the New York Times covered 2016, and their findings are just as stark. “Of the 1,433 articles that mentioned Trump or Clinton,” during the last 69 days of the 2016 campaign, “291 were devoted to scandals or other personal matters while only 70 mentioned policy, and of these only 60 mentioned any details of either candidate’s positions.”
One-hundred fifty of these New York Times articles, moreover, appeared on the paper’s front page. Of these, only 16 discussed policy in any way, “of which six had no details, four provided details on Trump’s policy only, one on Clinton’s policy only, and five made some comparison between the two candidates’ policies.” By contrast, the Times ran 10 front-page articles on Clinton’s emails in just six days, between October 29 and November 3.
The overarching impression created by this reporting, in other words, was that the emails were more important than all of the policy questions facing voters in 2016 — questions like whether millions of Americans would lose health care, whether the United States would bar immigrants because of their religion, and who would control the Supreme Court.
We cannot know with certainty what would have happened if news outlets did not fixate on this story during 2016. But as Tina Nguyen wrote in Vanity Fair, “you could fit all the voters who cost Clinton the election in a mid-sized football stadium.” As FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver wrote in 2017, “Hillary Clinton would probably be president if FBI Director James Comey had not sent a letter to Congress on Oct. 28” that reinvigorated the emails story shortly before the election.
We do know, moreover, that the obsessive coverage of Clinton’s emails shaped how voters perceived the 2016 race. In September 2016, Gallup asked voters what they recalled hearing about the two major presidential candidates. The word cloud for Trump primarily shows a mixture of immigration policy and generic campaign terms.
Meanwhile, Clinton’s word cloud speaks for itself.
The press obsession with government IT security, moreover, appears to be a passing fad that ended the moment Clinton lost her shot at the White House. News broke last November, for example, that First Daughter and presidential aide Ivanka Trump “sent hundreds of emails last year to White House aides, Cabinet officials and her assistants using a personal account, many of them in violation of federal records rules.” Yet this story received only a fraction of the coverage that Clinton’s emails received.
. . . And now we have an appropriate bookend for this media-made scandal: a State Department report that finds it was no big deal in the end, published on page A16 of the New York Times.
. . . The State Department’s report reaches two broad conclusions. Clinton’s “use of a private email system to conduct official business added an increased degree of risk” that classified information would be compromised. But “there was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.”
In 2016, the State Department’s inspector general also determined that Clinton’s Republican predecessors, Secretaries Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, also received classified information on their personal email accounts.
. . . Clinton’s use of private email was the sort of minor scandal that the public deserved to be informed about at some point during the 2016 election — after which the news cycle could move on to other, more important stories. But that sure as hell wasn’t how it was covered. Indeed, it is likely that Donald Trump is president today in part because of the press’s obsession with this very small story.
Months after the 2016 election, a team of researchers at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society set out to quantify which issues received coverage — and which issues were ignored — by major media outlets during that election. To do so, they read thousands of campaign-related articles in several major outlets, and counted how many sentences were devoted to various issues. The results are striking.
As CJR later summarized this research, the Berkman Klein Center “found roughly four times as many Clinton-related sentences that described scandals as opposed to policies, whereas Trump-related sentences were one-and-a-half times as likely to be about policy as scandal.” Indeed, emails so dominated coverage that “the various Clinton-related email scandals—her use of a private email server while secretary of state, as well as the DNC and John Podesta hacks—accounted for more sentences than all of Trump’s scandals combined (65,000 vs. 40,000) and more than twice as many as were devoted to all of her policy positions.”
Meanwhile, CJR researchers Duncan J. Watts and David M. Rothschild did a deep dive into how the New York Times covered 2016, and their findings are just as stark. “Of the 1,433 articles that mentioned Trump or Clinton,” during the last 69 days of the 2016 campaign, “291 were devoted to scandals or other personal matters while only 70 mentioned policy, and of these only 60 mentioned any details of either candidate’s positions.”
One-hundred fifty of these New York Times articles, moreover, appeared on the paper’s front page. Of these, only 16 discussed policy in any way, “of which six had no details, four provided details on Trump’s policy only, one on Clinton’s policy only, and five made some comparison between the two candidates’ policies.” By contrast, the Times ran 10 front-page articles on Clinton’s emails in just six days, between October 29 and November 3.
The overarching impression created by this reporting, in other words, was that the emails were more important than all of the policy questions facing voters in 2016 — questions like whether millions of Americans would lose health care, whether the United States would bar immigrants because of their religion, and who would control the Supreme Court.
We cannot know with certainty what would have happened if news outlets did not fixate on this story during 2016. But as Tina Nguyen wrote in Vanity Fair, “you could fit all the voters who cost Clinton the election in a mid-sized football stadium.” As FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver wrote in 2017, “Hillary Clinton would probably be president if FBI Director James Comey had not sent a letter to Congress on Oct. 28” that reinvigorated the emails story shortly before the election.
We do know, moreover, that the obsessive coverage of Clinton’s emails shaped how voters perceived the 2016 race. In September 2016, Gallup asked voters what they recalled hearing about the two major presidential candidates. The word cloud for Trump primarily shows a mixture of immigration policy and generic campaign terms.
. . . And now we have an appropriate bookend for this media-made scandal: a State Department report that finds it was no big deal in the end, published on page A16 of the New York Times.
Maybe the Liberal Media won't screw the Democrat this time. Maybe people will learn to keep their eye on the ball. And maybe monkeys will fly out of my butt.
