A WaPo Editorial Worth Kudos

The following editorial appeared in the Washington Post after NBC's Commander-in-Chief forum, and deserves to be commended, quoted and widely reprinted.

"The Hillary Clinton email story is out of control
 By Editorial Board

"Judging by the amount of time NBC’s Matt Lauer spent pressing Hillary Clinton on her emails during Wednesday’s national security presidential forum, one would think that her homebrew server was one of the most important issues facing the country this election. It is not. There are a thousand other substantive issues — from China’s aggressive moves in the South China Sea to National Security Agency intelligence-gathering to military spending — that would have revealed more about what the candidates know and how they would govern. Instead, these did not even get mentioned in the first of 5½ precious prime-time hours the two candidates will share before Election Day, while emails took up a third of Ms. Clinton’s time.

"Sadly, Mr. Lauer’s widely panned handling of the candidate forum was not an aberration. Judging by polls showing that voters trust Mr. Trump more than Ms. Clinton, as well as other evidence, it reflects a common shorthand for this election articulated by NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick last week: 'You have Donald Trump, who’s openly racist,' he said. Then, of Ms. Clinton: 'I mean, we have a presidential candidate who’s deleted emails and done things illegally and is a presidential candidate. That doesn’t make sense to me, because if that was any other person, you’d be in prison.'

"In fact, Ms. Clinton’s emails have endured much more scrutiny than an ordinary person’s would have, and the criminal case against her was so thin that charging her would have been to treat her very differently. Ironically, even as the email issue consumed so much precious airtime, several pieces of news reported Wednesday should have taken some steam out of the story. First is a memo FBI Director James B. Comey sent to his staff explaining that the decision not to recommend charging Ms. Clinton was 'not a cliff-hanger' and that people 'chest-beating' and second-guessing the FBI do not know what they are talking about. Anyone who claims that Ms. Clinton should be in prison accuses, without evidence, the FBI of corruption or flagrant incompetence.

"Second is the emergence of an email exchange between Ms. Clinton and former secretary of state Colin Powell in which he explained that he used a private computer and bypassed State Department servers while he ran the agency, even when communicating with foreign leaders and top officials. Mr. Powell attempted last month to distance himself from Ms. Clinton’s practices, which is one of the many factors that made the email story look worse. Now, it seems, Mr. Powell engaged in similar behavior.

"Last is a finding that 30 Benghazi-related emails that were recovered during the FBI email investigation and recently attracted big headlines had nothing significant in them. Only one, in fact, was previously undisclosed, and it contained nothing but a compliment from a diplomat. But the damage of the '30 deleted Benghazi emails' story has already been done.

"Ms. Clinton is hardly blameless. She treated the public’s interest in sound record-keeping cavalierly. A small amount of classified material also moved across her private server. But it was not obviously marked as such, and there is still no evidence that national security was harmed. Ms. Clinton has also admitted that using the personal server was a mistake. The story has vastly exceeded the boundaries of the facts.

"Imagine how history would judge today’s Americans if, looking back at this election, the record showed that voters empowered a dangerous man because of . . . a minor email scandal. There is no equivalence between Ms. Clinton’s wrongs and Mr. Trump’s manifest unfitness for office."

Shocked by the Polls?

Have the post Labor Day polls shocked the New York Times, or was it Paul Krugman’s incisive September 5th column? Or have NYT news editors and reporters suddenly realized what their continuously negative coverage of Hillary may have wrought? Have they suddenly awakened to the frightening consequences of their non-stop/ non-critical attention to Trump? Do they finally understand which candidate always lies? Which candidate is the truly “corrupt” one? Whose "scandals" are the most truly scandalous?

Paul Krugman on the Campaign: Weasel Words and the Presumption of Guilt

In an excellent column (“Hillary Clinton Gets Gored,” New York Times, Op Ed, 9-5-16), Paul Krugman expresses succinctly the reasons he and many others are beginning to have a “sick, sinking feeling” about the presidential campaign. Issuing an implicit warning, Krugman notes that the widespread, continuous suggestions and/or outright attacks on Hillary Clinton as guilty of unspecified dishonesty, illegal conflicts of interest and vague “corruption” (all unsupported by facts) are painfully reminiscent of the kind of baseless insinuations that ended up destroying Al Gore’s campaign. (Krugman might also have mentioned the similar “Swiftboating” that doomed John Kerry).

 “True,” Krugman says, “there aren’t many efforts to pretend that Donald Trump is a paragon of honesty. But it’s hard to escape the impression that he’s being graded on a curve. If he manages to read from a TelePrompter without going off script, he’s being presidential. If he seems to suggest that he wouldn’t round up all 11 million undocumented immigrants right away, he’s moving into the mainstream. And many of his multiple scandals, like what appear to be clear payoffs to state attorneys general to back off investigating Trump University, get remarkably little attention.”

With media coverage of Clinton, on the other hand, the operative presumption is always that anything she does “must be corrupt,” an attitude, Krugman says, “most spectacularly illustrated by the increasingly bizarre coverage of the Clinton Foundation.” He points out that the Clinton Foundation “is, by all accounts, a big force for good in the world. For example, Charity Watch, an independent watchdog, gives it an ‘A’ rating—better than the American Red Cross.” But he also acknowledges that “any operation that raises and spends billions of dollars creates the potential for conflicts of interest…So it was right and appropriate to investigate the foundation’s operations to see if there were any improper quid pro quos. As reporters like to say, the sheer size of the foundation ‘raises questions.’ But nobody seems willing to accept the answers to those questions, which are, very clearly, ‘no.’”

Krugman urges journalists to ask whether they are reporting facts or simply engaging in innuendo, and he urges the public to read with a critical eye. “If reports about a candidate talk about how something “raises questions,” creates “shadows,” or anything similar, be aware that these are all too often weasel words used to create the impression of wrongdoing out of thin air.”

Others have also commented on the use of innuendo in the coverage of Clinton. In Vox (8-30-16), Matthew Yglesias effectively contrasted the way the media treats the Clinton Foundation with the coverage of a similar charitable foundation established by former Secretary of State Colin Powell. With the latter, the context has been a “presumption of innocence.” For Hillary, of course, the context is always the presumption that she, and anything connected to her, is bound to be “corrupt.” Even when reporters find no evidence of wrongdoing (Like Krugman, Yglesias cites examples), they insinuate otherwise, and never bother to issue corrections. “The perception that Clinton is corrupt is one of her most profound handicaps as a politician,” says Yglesias. “And what’s particularly crippling about it is that evidence of her corruption is so widespread exactly because everyone knows she’s corrupt.”

Will responsible members of the press pay attention? Will they finally realize that, at the least, their baseless insinuations wildly distort the public’s perception of Hillary Clinton? Will they understand that, at worst, their feckless reportage could hand over our country’s presidency to the most preposterous, most unqualified candidate in recent history?