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?
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