POSTER’S NOTE: Dear all,
I’ve just done something I essentially never do. I’ve gone into two comments and redacted a couple of sentences that made what read to me as sexually hostile statements about a specific reporter.
The commenters are long time and respected members of the community, and I not only get that this is a delightfully expressive environment — I’ve certainly had occasion to discuss unnatural acts with oxidized farm tools myself. But in the real world, reporters are being threatened daily by Trump folks and others — and female reporters get savaged more, and in more horrible ways. I don’t believe in banning except in true extremis, and the comments edited don’t come close to ban-hammer eligibility. But I don’t feel OK leaving that particular line of attack up on the blog, or attached to a post under my name. So I’ve exercised the god-like powers of the blog to take out a couple of lines that hit too close to home, at least for me, in a time and place where women doing difficult jobs have enough to deal with as it is.
If anyone’s bothered by this, write to me, and I’ll make sure you get a full refund —
Tom
_________________________
Hey, folks. Been spending way too much time on Twitter lately, ranting about coverage and the election, and hence have sucked up all the would-be blogging time. But in doing so, I’ve managed to begin a conversation with some folks who actually perform such coverage. One of them asked me to be specific about a charge they found hard to swallow: that there is a systematic difference between the way Trump is covered and Clinton is in the major venues.
That correspondent and others pointed out, accurately, that at least since May, and in many cases before then, there have been major, damning, utterly critical stories about Trump. Given that, wouldn’t complaints about, say, stories on Clinton’s emails or the alleged corruption inherent in the Clinton Foundation-State Department nexus suggest more a partisan reaction, hypersensitive about stories critical of the side I favor, rather than a measured accounting of the full coverage record?
My answer was and that while there are indeed such stories, and that many of the Clinton pieces that have enraged me are at some definition of accuracy perfectly on-the-beam. But then I go on to say that the question of systematic bias is not about each single story. Rather, it turns on the entire editorial apparatus of campaign coverage: how those stories are assigned, pursued, resourced, and extended past day one or two coverage, and how the facts within them are set up for interpretation.
That argument leads to an obvious and appropriate response:
Prove it.
It’s going to take me some time to do so across the range of questions I’ve actually received. But there was a piece in today’s New York Times that provides a case study (the fancy name for anecdata) that offers an example of the gap between fine-scale factual accuracy and a truthful exercise in journalism
For the record: what I’m attempting to do isn’t simply to say “You Suck!” to The New York Times, the first target of my logorrhea below, or anyone else. It is to help smart and incredibly hard working people realize what’s often hard to notice deep in the weeds and the mud. That would be exactly where one is in the maze — which would be the first step to navigating to somewhere better.
With that as prologue, here’s what I just wrote to one of my correspondents. That reporter challenged me on several points, and I began what will be a multipart response by walking back, just a little, my somewhat incendiary claim that current campaign coverage reminded me of the Times’ Iraq war lead-in coverage — to which I added my own desire to give a specific example of what I meant by a biased approach to a story. So here goes, in a slightly edited version of what I sent in private:
________________
…The Iraq War mention isn’t a perfect analogy, I’ll agree: there’s no comparison to Judith Miller in the Times’ current campaign coverage, and there’s no sign I can see of the editorial or management errors that allowed her coverage (and other stuff too, TBH) such impact.
The Iraq war serves for me, and I think many critics of the Times as a kind of existence proof: the Times is capable of major failures that have huge consequences, which means, to me, that it’s important to be very vigilant. I know this seems obvious, and perhaps even insulting to those inside the organization – but from outside the newsroom, it often appears that the NYT has a difficult time admitting errosr, especially those more complicated than a straightforward factual mistake. A personal anecdote: I had drinks some years ago with a NYTimes reporter (still there, not on the politics desk) and at one point in our conversation (late, after a number of rounds) he said something like NYTimes reporters don’t write stuff that’s not true; we get more scrutiny than you believe so we make sure it doesn’t happen. (Fallible memory, some years, but that was the gist). And I’m sure the scrutiny is there (heck – here I am part of it.) But that was not a reassuring statement, as I think you can see.
I’ll get into this more below but my broad framework is that with exceptions, the way the thumb is on the scale (from my point of view) in NYT coverage of the campaign is not at the level you work, on the reporting day by day and the production of individual stories. It is rather on the editorial apparatus that creates the framework for readers to interpret your coverage.
You ask for specifics – let me give you an example from today’s paper, “Emails Raise New Questions About Clinton Foundation to State Dept.”
[Edited to add: Hmmm, didn’t realize how long this sucker was on the page. Continued after the newly inserted jump]
The headline suggests a new problem, one that implies conflict of interest and/or corruption (pay-to-play and all that). The lede makes that inference explicit, as it says the emails raised “new questions about whether people tied to the Clinton Foundation received special access….”
If one then reads the story with care, one finds that the person “tied to” the foundation is actually an aide to former President Clinton; his tie is that he (in a prior position, implied though not stated in the article) helped set up one arm of the Foundation. So already the bald statement of the headline is undermined by the second paragraph of the story. “Aides to Former President seek Diplomatic Passports” is a headline that still implies criticism, but is less so, I think than the reach to the foundation – and is more accurate.
Digging a little further, the story states that the passports are not sought for some general privilege, but for a specific and at least quasi-diplomatic reason, President Clinton’s North Korea trip in which he sought the release of two American citizens. Not sure how this supports the Foundation-State pay to play framework.
And yet, paragraph three makes the suggestion, however, that this is part of that alleged scandal:
“Mrs. Clinton has long denied that donors had any special influence at the State Department.”
This is clearly a problem, from a reader’s point of view. Douglas Band is a staffer, not a donor. The piece here has Secretary Clinton answering a different charge – or at least different facts – than the preceding paragraphs actually contain.
Finally, and crucially, the story never actually says whether Band the others got their passports. It quotes a State Dept. release on the policy, but never quite closes the loop. Other media sources say that they didn’t – which is what makes the story and its headline so problematical as journalism, at least as I see it.
Here’s the question: does the foundation have a pay-to-play relationship with the State Department. Let’s ask: a deep foundation association (not a donor, no cash changing hands) asks for a seemingly out-of-the-ordinary favor. Do they get it? No. Question raised and answered. Had the story been framed: latest emails show no special favors at State – then you’d have advanced a complicated story. But the headline, the lede, and many other aspects of the story suggest an interpretation at odds with the actual facts reported.
It’s also fascinating to me the way the whole anecdote is presented as something out of the ordinary for State Department business. As you know, so this is a PGO – State is the agency that does things like try to get imprisoned Americans out of danger. North Korea is a nation in which the only channels we have are back channels. A former president serving as such a back channel is hardly a radical innovation in US statecraft – and yet this whole incident is given in this story the aura of corruption and scandal.
That’s what makes the last third of the story problematic as well. Here you have an actual donor, getting a meeting. Two thoughts on that: first, I’d love context, if not in this single story, in your extended coverage: what did Condoleeza Rice’s appointment book contain? Powell’s? and so on. We know that the Bush administration had both accuracy and secrecy issues – think Cheney’s still shadowed energy task force. But we don’t know to what extent Clinton’s approach as SoS is standard response to influence and power in Washington or some distinctive pathology that deserves all the attention the Times and others have brought to bear on it. I’ve got my suspicions – but this is in fact something that I rely on the world’s best journalistic venue to contextualize and explore.
Second: this particular donor was providing the infrastructure for the backchannel aimed at freeing two Americans imprisoned by an adversarial regime. How surprising – how inappropriate – is it for this meeting to take place?
Finally: the story gives the Clinton campaign space to assert Judicial Watch is “a right-wing organization that has been going after the Clintons since the 1990s.” It seems to me that it would be useful for the Times as a standard matter to note in its own voice that its reporting is based on Judicial Watch’s original work (which it does not do before the Clinton campaign quote) and to describe, again in its own terms and voice, what Judicial Watch is. Putting the argument in quotes from one side or the other is a he-said-she-said tactic. I’m not saying how the Times should describe one of the two adversaries in this story, just that it should do so in a way that allows the reader to draw a more nuanced understanding of the terms of this argument.
All of the above is a dissection of a story that I concede is accurately reported. There are no wrong facts in it, as far as I can tell on a quick review – except, perhaps, for the implication that Band’s connection to the Foundation is as a donor.
But even that’s suggestion by juxtaposition rather than an outright error. And yet it all adds up to a deeply misleading account, one that hints at and suggests corruption through “questions.” It thus adds up to a deeply misleading account, an outcome that emerges from editorial choices (like the headline) and from the way facts that don’t support the headline are placed next to suggestions or queries that reinforce the sense or smell of corruption – which just in case anyone missed it was made explicit in the closing quote from Trump.
And that leads to the last example within the article that looks to me very strongly as if there’s a presumption of Clinton wrongdoing that surrounds the decisions made about assigning, constructing and writing, editing this piece and placing it high on the website. The penultimate paragraph in the piece reads in full:
A separate batch of State Department documents released by Judicial Watch last month also revealed contacts between the State Department and Clinton Foundation donors. In one such exchange, Mr. Band sought to put a billionaire donor in touch with the department’s former ambassador to Lebanon.
That link leads to an August 9 NYT story by Eric Lichtblau that discusses the release of a net of 44 new emails, and it presents the story at its head as one detailing Judicial Watch’s success in getting those emails and their interpretation of their meaning.
Left out of that story is the crucial fact: again, a major donor sought a favor from the State Dept., a meeting and didn’t get it. Even more, the donor sought a visa from State, and had it denied. In other words the actual underlying facts explicitly contradicted that claim that Lichtblau allowed Judicial Watch to make in the piece – that there was “no daylight” between the foundation and State –without any challenge or exposition by Lichtblau himself.
So here again, you have a possible example of corruption that wasn’t: the relationship with the foundation, even at the major $ level, did not produce either a violation of State procedure (a visa where there shouldn’t have been) or access. So that’s bad journalism on its own terms – and it’s badness is amplified when today’s flawed story draws on that prior flawed story for support.
I’ve got to run to do some actual work – talking to a guy about an 18th c. stock market fraud (don’t call it history; think of it as extremely long lead-time journalism). So I’ll have to get to the rest of your argument below over the next few days. I’ll close for now then with this observation: the Times story that seems to me to be so deeply flawed is having exactly the impact you’d expect for significant story in your extremely powerful venue. My home-town Boston Globe ran it verbatim. The usual suspects on the right – the Daily Caller and such – are touting it, with the inevitable “Even the liberal New York Times” slant to their accounts, gaining credibility not for the actual facts within the story, but for the aura, the feeling the piece imparts.
There’s more to the question of whether or not the Times is putting the same effort and the same interpretative rigor on coverage of Trump vs. Clinton, of course, and I will try to get to at least slightly more quantitative arguments in a later email. But if you want a case study why I, both a partisan and a practitioner and teacher of journalism, argue that the Times has its thumb on the scale, this story seems like a pretty powerful example.
Note: if I’m right, and this is a systematic problem and not just an issue in a Sept. 2 and August 9 pair of stories, then I’d bet that the issue is one of unconscious (and hence much harder to detect and deal with) than conscious bias. I’m guessing – and it’s always a fool’s game to diagnose at a distance – that the long-nourished sense of the Clintons as dodgy has an effect. But note also that the criticism doesn’t depend on any presumed path to the ultimate effect….
___________
So that was an attempt to persuade a member of the working press that there might truly be a problem. (And by the way — I do mean persuade. I’m trying to get past my rage to get those who are doing what is genuinely a difficult job to do it better.)
Your thoughts?
Images: Norman Rockwell, Fact and Fiction, 1917
Elihu Vedder, Corrupt Legislation, mural in the Library of Congress, 1896
Antoniazzo Romano, Virgin and Child with Donor, 1480.
Baud
This keeps happening. They are not entitled to good faith until they prove themselves.
Long term, we can’t keep complaining. Need to come up with some solution. The mainstream media faces competition from right wing media, but not from the left. Systemic problem.
Baud
When the evidence proves that donors didn’t receive special favors, then I want that reflected in the headline.
Big R
Tom, if you would be interested in a BJ coauthor for the inevitable APSR piece you’ve got here, send me an e-mail. Ahem.
MRK
debbie
David Koch linked to your Twitter stream (or whatever they call them) yesterday. It was brilliant! As someone who was a loyal, daily reader of every page of every issue of the NYT back in the days of real reporters, I mourn the loss of NYT’s real integrity.
Iowa Old Lady
Your argument is clearly laid out. I’ll be interested to hear how it’s received.
Baud
Tom, you are like the Obama of Balloon Juice. Very thoughtful. I hope your way succeeds.
redshirt
@debbie: One of the Koch Bros?!
debbie
@redshirt:
Seriously?
debbie
@Baud:
As opposed to those of the Trump Foundation, ammirite?
Baud
@debbie: Who knows? Is that even newsworthy?
SgrAstar
Fascinating analysis, Tom. Sad to see how far the Times news desk’s credibility is diverging from their (mostly) excellent stable of op-ed columnists.
RobertDSC-iPhone 6
Fantastic work. Thank you.
Gin & Tonic
See e.g. Duranty, Walter.
redshirt
@debbie: …Yes? It was a question. Are there other Kochs out there?
Baud
@redshirt: Nym of frequent BJ commenter.
Josie
This is the type of lucid, well organized argument that might actually cause a reporter or editor to stop and think about what is happening. It is really good work, and i hope you continue to pursue it. Thanks for the time and effort takes to do this.
debbie
@Baud:
I don’t know. The Trump Foundation made a donation to the FL AG, Pam Bondi, so she would back off investigating Trump University. This would seem to be right up the NYT’s alley.
debbie
@redshirt:
He was one of the first to start with all the daily nym changing nonsense. He mostly posts in the mornings.
Blueskies
Hi Tom,
Thoroughly enjoying “Vulcan.” Now that the pandering is over, here’s something to cheer your long weekend, avoid all labor because…your work has been done for you in the commentary on the Tumulty piece in WaPo:
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/9/2/1566157/-There-really-is-a-conspiracy-against-Hillary-Clinton-but-it-s-all-her-fault
Baud
@debbie: Bondi is not a Democrat. Hard to see the story here.
Wilbur
The important thing is the response. The oldest academic game in the world is when you make an assertion the person you are making that assertion to asks you to prove it rather than giving some evidence in the other direction. This isn’t bad. But if you actually lay out the case and the person who asked you to prove it does not respond in some substantive way their position is called in to question. In my experience in these types of arguments when one person does prove it the person who made the challenge is silent. I think if that is the case this person should be called out. They should be asked to present an article from the New York Times where Trump is treat in similar fashion. Otherwise they will just take their “prove it” to the next person, which I assume it what is going to happen (from painful experience).
debbie
@Baud:
The story is not about Democrat or about Clinton. The story is that Trump, through the Trump Foundation, made a donation to stop an investigation into his fraudulent Trump University. Trump keeps claiming the Clinton Foundation is nothing more than pay to play, when actually, that’s exactly what the Trump Foundation is for Trump.
Tom Levenson
@debbie: Might want to adjust your snark meter.
dopealope
Rare Commenter, but this is a really excellent read.
Baud
@debbie: As I’ve said before, I’m waiting for Trump to say that Hillary has ED.
les
Nicely done, Tom. One can only hope it’s considered in context, rather than a chance to dispute/explain away the details of a single story.
redshirt
@debbie: D’oh! That guy. I like his posting. I assume he’s not an actual Koch bro.
James E Powell
The NYT is not likely to admit or correct this sort of error because it isn’t really an error. It’s an editorial decision. The right analogy isn’t the Iraq War promotions but the Whitewater reporting in the 90s. They will continue to do this – and they will continue in their obtuse denial that they are doing it – for however long Hillary Clinton is president.
I’m inferring that it is the product of a personal animus from the very top that the working editors and writers know they must serve. As with every large organization, one doesn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
Trentrunner
Tom, this might fit in somewhere in your brief, since the NYT is one of the reporters you’re talking to:
TPM this week compiled a list of NYT articles on HRC “scandals” that repeatedly used the terms “shadow” and “cloud,” i.e., shadow of suspicion, cloud of uncertainty.
Implication is that NYT repeatedly relies on these vague scare words and thus fabricates the “smoke” in the “Well, where there’s smoke, there’s fire” assumption that is part of every MSM story about Clinton for the past 25 years.
bmoak
Digby recently made a post on how dependent a lot of mainstream news organizations are dependent on links from the Drudge Report to steer content to their sites and articles. For example, over half of the people reading Associated Press articles on the web arrive via links from the Drudge Report.
Editors and publishers know what that particular group of readers want to read and it isn’t “No Wrongdoing Found in Clinton Foundation Investigation”.
Baud
@redshirt: It’s more fun to assume he is.
James E Powell
@Josie:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”― Upton Sinclair,
Patricia Kayden
@Baud: It will be printed in small letters on page 22 below the fold. That’s the most we can hope for from a newspaper which has hated the Clintons for decades.
SiubhanDuinne
That was brilliant, Tom. This long-time non-smoker needs a cigarette. I’m not sure why you’re being so coy about revealing your NYT correspondent’s name, but I’ll respect your choice to keep him/her anonymous for now. If he/she responds, I hope you’ll share his/her comments with us in another FP post.
I appreciate more than I can say your ability to help me read the news more critically. When I first saw the story, I came away feeling kind of squicky and uneasy, but didn’t pursue my feelings any further. Mr. Charles P. Pierce helped me see the error of my ways, but where he took a cleaver, you take a scalpel.
Did you copy your correspondence with the NYT reporter to the ombudsperson (can’t remember the name of the incumbent)?
If the New York Times had any sense, they would hire you as a regular opinion columnist.
AkaDad
This is excellent work and I’m looking forward to reading about further conversations.
Also, I like the approach you’re using. You will never persuade anyone of anything by insulting them.
On a lighter note, you ironically misspelled “errors.”
Omnes Omnibus
@Tom Levenson: Your patience and politeness in this situation is amazing. Well done.
CaseyL
That is a terrific letter – lays the case out accurately and calmly.
I canceled my subscription yesterday (have subscribed since 2001). I told the nice lady exactly why – the last straw for me was the Patrick Healey story on Trump’s immigration rally, esp. since he was also the one who did the hatchet job about how Anthony Weiner being a douchenozzle “cast a shadow” over Clinton’s campaign.
We got into a conversation.
She brought up “balance,” and I said it’s false balance when you’ve got a completely unfit person like Trump running for President. We really got into that one.
She said I should stay with the paper because the election is in a few weeks and Trump will no longer be a story. I said that the first thing the GOP House will do once Hillary is elected is start an impeachment proceeding. She said, “Oh, they can’t do that!” and I said “Sure they can. What’s to stop them?” and then I said the media (including the NYT) will solemnly and gravely cover the proceedings as though they were legitimate and there was an actual issue.
She said ultimately the responsibility is on the voters. We really got into that one, too: yes, voters are responsible, but they make their decisions based on the information they get. If the information they get is flawed, so will their decisions be. I mentioned the old computer programming term “GIGO,” and explained it to her (she must be awfully young).
I told her, more than once, that it hurt to cancel, that I had relied on the NYT for many years, but its history of Clinton Derangement Syndrome had finally gotten too serious and I could no longer trust its reportage.
Trollhattan
@Trentrunner: Ooooh, shadowy clouds of doubt! Very persistent with the words, aren’t they, to the point they combine them a couple times. Can “Clinton event eclipsed by new email revelations” be far off?
Baud
@Patricia Kayden:
In kanji.
geg6
This is great stuff and your tact and nonconfrontational style may actually have an effect. FSM knows, my obscenity filled rants where the nicest thing I call them is hacks isn’t making a dent. ;-)
dmsilev
It’s also well worth mentioning that the Times also hasn’t yet bothered to run a story on the actual pay-for-play problem with the Trump Foundation giving money to Florida’s AG while she was at least considering (and then dropping) an investigation of Trump University.
p.a.
prediction: the nyt rep will focus on a possible questionable grammatical formulation somewhere in your email, a spelling error or possible split infinitive, or question your characterization of some of their work, to produce a 3,000 word non-response response.
CalD
And they wonder why Sec Clinton doesn’t want to hang with them. These guys love to count the days since Clinton’s last news conference but every time some knucklehead pulls a stunt like the NYT did today, they may be adding another week to their sentence.
Bobby Thomson
Those bean counting fucksticks at the New York Times are fucking idiots. There SHOULD be more critical stories about Trump because he literally is a Nazi sympathizer. And their defense of “partisan whining” would have a lot more force if they had bothered to give ANY coverage to Trump’s bribery of the Florida Attorney General.
TOM LEVENSON EDITORIAL NOTE: I’ve cut a phrase here. See explanation in the post above
Baud
@CaseyL:
Manufactured balance = lying.
debbie
@Baud:
I believe Ailes has penciled that in for October 15th.
Trentrunner
@dmsilev: Tom is addressing this story right now on Twitter. :)
redshirt
We’re doomed as a nation, structurally it seems.
When you have the big money in cahoots with the Know Nothings and fully enabled by corporate owned media, what escape is there? They can grind everything down to talcum and blow away the remains.
geg6
@Bobby Thomson:
She’s the head of the triple headed hack monster currently covering all the Clinton “scandals.” I hate these people with the heat of a thousand suns. Tom was right the first time–Haberman = Miller.
Wapiti
Tom, I must say: you probably spent more effort in analyzing, describing, and refuting the Times’ story than they spent writing it.
Blueskies
@Blueskies: Not sure why I’m in moderation, but Tom’s great piece is echoed in this commentary from the GOS:
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/9/2/1566157/-There-really-is-a-conspiracy-against-Hillary-Clinton-but-it-s-all-her-fault
Bobby Thomson
Really, Tom, you’re far too kind. It’s clear that someone in a corner office is killing the truly nuclear exposes on Trump.
JPL
@dmsilev: [REDACTED — TOM LEVENSON] I haven’t canceled Sunday home delivery yet, but I’m close. Tom’s approach might be better though.
What a thoughtful article and thank you Tom for writing it.
Wapiti
@Bobby Thomson:
Heck, his dad belonged to the KKK (the apple didn’t fall far from that tree). Maybe there’s a story there – how the KKK back in the day attacked not only blacks, but also Catholics, Hispanics… whatever the local minority was. Is it any wonder that Catholics don’t like Trump?
Iowa Old Lady
@CaseyL: She said ultimately the responsibility is on the voters. We really got into that one, too: yes, voters are responsible, but they make their decisions based on the information they get
SiubhanDuinne
@Wapiti:
‘Twas ever thus.
Bobby Thomson
Also, too, people who xerox stuff written by Judicial Fucking Watch don’t get to get on their journalistic high horse about their high standards.
Jesus.Fucking.Christonastick.
JMG
Alienating one’s customers (Times subscribers are predominantly well-to-do or at least comfortable liberals, most of whom live in NYC and the other cities of the Bowash corridor) is seldom a good business plan.
Omnes Omnibus
@Bobby Thomson:
Deep fried?
Bobby Thomson
@Omnes Omnibus: I love you man.
Eljai
You can bet that villagers like Cokie Roberts and Mara Liasson will quote a snippet from that NY Times article and remind us all, once again, how unlikable and untrustworthy Hillary is. Anyhoo, thanks, Tom, for tackling this in such a thoughtful and insightful manner. Back in 2008, I used to try to politely email news organizations on a regular basis when I thought they left out key facts. It was my feeble attempt to counter right-wing talking points. Now I’m feeling kind of inspired to dust off that project.
scav
If the NYT ombudsperson or public editor was anything more than window-dressing, getting such analyses out by other means would not be necessary (here or in conversations with actual reporters). Go Tom. @CaseyL:’s interaction with their phone desk does not reflect well on their general ethos (or concern for voiced user’s opinions) either, although perhaps expecting a phone jockey to do anything but a canned sales pitch is perhaps over-hopeful.
RAM
Tom, here’s a rundown from early this year you might find interesting:
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/01/02/how-shoddy-ny-times-journalism-has-already-marr/207685
lowercase steve
The concepts of “leading statement” and “leading questions?” are high-school level material. It is absolutely amazing to me that you have to explain to these supposed professional journalists in painstaking detail what is something any 15 year-old could recognize. Our media is really just a disaster.
Oh, and, of course, “we have no comparison group so we can’t actually say anything we are reporting here is (ab)normal.” Jesus Christ…
redshirt
@efgoldman:
Wha?! I get your point, but this is 100% wrong. This is why Fox is truly pernicious, as they sell themselves as “Fair and Balanced”. That’s the entire channel’s tagline. People believe it! And they’re treated like any other news org when in fact, as you say, they are completely biased.
Emma
Excellent work!
Baud
I’m not the biggest Matthew Yglesias fan, but he’s been good on the media bias issue.
realbtl
Thanks for an extremely well-written response (though I expected no less from reading your books). Now how can we get the NYT to publish this on the front page?
Calming Influence
Also missing in the Times story is the common sense observation that if someone is traveling to North Korea in a somewhat adversarial capacity, they would sure as fuck like to be traveling under a diplomatic passport, so as not to end up in North Korea for the rest of their life.
weaselone
I knew the media was bad, but I never thought they would actually keep up the both sides do it, magical balance fairy act in the face of an actual fascist. They slithered under that bar and went one lower. They are actually carrying Trump over the finish line. He was dead in the water. He’s spent piss all on advertising to get his message out. The media has showered him enough free airtime to balance out Hillary’s add buys. They have downplayed Trump’s fascism, swept over his past, let him get away with things that would have broken any other candidate while at the same time slamming Hillary with headlines and innuendo that directly oppose the facts they themselves uncovered in the name of regenerating a horse race.
Baud
@weaselone: I agree.
OCD
Good job.
Here’s a little more ammo:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/new-york-times-cloud-shadow-clinton-coverage
sigaba
@redshirt: I’m firmly of the opinion that newspapers should have an outright openly stated “interest,” and this interest should relate to concrete people and things. I’m not sure Fox News actually has that, though. They are just biased, and they plainly try to position themselves as writing from The View From Nowhere.
By Villager logic, J’Accuse! was biased.
lurker dean
great stuff, tom, thanks for pushing back at the false balance!
gogol's wife
@CaseyL:
Good for you.
I’m addicted to the crossword puzzles. But even they ain’t what they used to be.
Baud
TPM
encephalopath
The Times writers may be able to point to critical articles about Trump, but claiming Trump criticism means balance is silly.
The negative Trump coverage is based on things that are real and true. They don’t go casting about making sleazy insinuations about corruption and influence peddling about Trump the way the do with Clinton. Too many of their Clinton critical articles are based on nothing when the evidence in the details actually fully exonerates her.
gogol's wife
@Wapiti:
“probably”?
petesh
Out in what we laughingly call the real world, I have been arguing with Bernie folks who think they were cheated. In this virtual corner of relative sanity, I implore everyone not to fall into a similar fallacy. Hard as it is to comprehend, there is a coalition of the deranged and the greedy that, put together, could even get this monster elected. My biggest media complaint is their LACK of coverage of issues. Now, what was it that Clinton gave a big speech about on Monday?
Actually WashPo ran an editorial about the topic (mental health) AND the lack of coverage, so good for them. So did Wonkette! The NYT ran an AP wire story.
Steeplejack
@redshirt:
Well, you’re the one who said, “Are there other Kochs out there?”
hovercraft
Great analysis Tom. Keep us posted on their response.
I posted this in an earlier thread.
Paul Glastris at Washington Monthly also had an article taking on the media more generally, and their attempts to turn the Clinton Foundation into the new Benghazi.
gogol's wife
@scav:
The NYT public editor began her tenure a few weeks ago by saying that the Times was too liberal.
Mike J
@gogol’s wife: You can sub to just the xwords.
gogol's wife
@Mike J:
But then you have to do them online, right? Even if you can print them, I don’t have a printer at home. I want my puzzle in my mailbox first thing in the morning, and I want to do it in pen on newsprint.
redshirt
@petesh: WaPo seems to be the only major newspaper willing to tell it like it is in regards Trump, and I suspect that’s because Trump long ago banned them. So they no longer have to grovel for access.
Or maybe Bezos doesn’t like Trump either.
scav
@gogol’s wife: ooooooooooo, that low bar is sinking. I gave up even bothering with checking there rather a while ago. Is she flashing her nylon-sheathed legs at us yet?
FlipYrWhig
You could try telling your reporter pen pal that their entire cohort is repellent pack-feeding creatures who everyone hates and that this is part of why their business is dying an unlamented and ignominious death.
Baud
@FlipYrWhig:
Best regards,
Tom
redshirt
@Baud: XXOO!
dww44
@bmoak: I can also add other anecdata. Tonight on both the CBS and NBC evening news there were segments about the FBI release of HRC’s emails that were part of the FBI’s CRIMINAL investigation into the whole email and private server issue.
Emphasis was very much placed on the CRIMINAL adjective, imo. I muted the TV. Probably shouldn’t have. But Is Comey maybe trying to fan the flames of this non-conspiracy by making sure all this crap is out there to cast continued doubt on Clinton’s integrity and judgement? It’s like a drip drip drip all the time.
Agorabum
@Baud: never would have happened in the baud! administration
Baud
@Agorabum: I’d be handing out special favors like candy.
Steeplejack
@Calming Influence:
Also, with the North Koreans’ insistence on rigid formality and their constant fear of being disrespected, they probably would want to be reassured that they were meeting with someone “official” and not some Joe Blow traveling on a vanilla passport.
Roger Moore
@Baud:
Sure, because if you hand out enough, they’ll start being ordinary favors instead of special favors, which ought to protect you from charges of favoritism. Genius!
schrodinger's cat
The Beltway media is an arm of the Republican party. Period. They are not neutral.
Blueskies
@encephalopath: Got it in one!
JR in WV
Hi
I haven’t finished even the OP story, but wanted to point out a typo in this line of the front page Op:
“that the NYT has a difficult time admitting errosr, especially ” errosr should be errors.
weaselone
I think Tom also makes a good point in that when we get the opportunity to point out bias in coverage to those who are actually doing the coverage, we should be careful in how we do so. I noted while looking through Katy Tur’s timeline that she fielded a question regarding the media not exposing Trumps lies. Her response was basically “Are you kidding me?”. The media is pointing out Trumps falsehoods and other issues, the problem is that any number of these deserves at least as much time and effort in pursuing as Clinton’s emails and that’s just not happening.
Belafon
Tom, if you are looking for a new writing project, I have one: Emmy Noether. Very influential mathematician that had to deal with sexism throughout her life. I think everyone should know about her, but most of the literature I have found is in German.
Baud
@weaselone: Good point.
weaselone
@dww44: That’s sort of counterbalanced by the fact this information was released on the Friday before a holiday weekend.
Baud
@weaselone: Another good point.
Kathleen O'Neill
@Baud: I was going to make the same observation. Tom, I love and appreciate your outrage coupled with your ability to provide a cogent response. Yes, and putting yourself in the shoes of the journalists you challenged is quite Obama-esque! Thank you for taking the time and energy to pursue this.
Petorado
Tom, I think the article you analyzed about the Clinton Foundation is an example of press release journalism. With reporters being expected to produce X amount of content per day (in both long-form and social media), they don’t have the time to do their own sleuthing. They sit at their desks and now rely on press releases for their story ideas.
Judicial Watch probably wrote a compelling press release. The NYT followed JW’s story framing. The NYT then went out to get quotes from both sides to achieve their perception of balance.
I’ve seen enough of my own press releases on hot-button issues get printed verbatim under the banner of “staff report” to realize that reporters get paid for volume of content and not veracity.
Some times I think reporters no longer realize that old-time reporters used to discover their own stories and not just rely upon the story ideas that come to them through email from parties interested in pursuing a singular perspective on a particular issue.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
Brilliant take-down. Thanks for posting this.
I don’t read newspapers any more, but I glance at the NY Times web page a few times a day. The headlines and the blurbs illustrate (to me) their bias against the Clintons.
E.g.”[FBI] Officials questioned Mrs. Clinton extensively about her use of email to discuss classified drone strikes, and about large numbers of emails destroyed by aides.”
All of the flavoring words there are intended to give the reader the impression that there must be some “fire” there with all the “smoke” that Judicial Watch is screaming about.
“The Times says that the FBI says that Hillary was sending classified information on her e-mails!!11”
No, it doesn’t, but they sure want you to think that.
“Extensively” “large numbers of e-mails destroyed”.
Does the FBI ever do a “cursory” investigation?
What kind of e-mails were they? Were they personal e-mails?
Based on the previous sentence, the implication is that huge numbers of e-mails discussing classified information were (or at least might have been!) destroyed by her flunkies (meaning it’s a huge conspiracy!!11).
It’s like this every day. And in addition to NYT stories getting picked up by other papers, it drives news stories on NPR. It’s impossible to escape.
And it’s because the NY Times won’t accept Hillary’s explanations, the explanations of others that work(ed) with her, the history of previous SoS using e-mail, etc., etc. As long as Judicial Watch puts out some press release on their latest heavily-redacted FOI documents, with the most deranged interpretation possible, the NY Times will be among the first to run with it, and remind us of all the “serious questions” about pay-to-play and on and on.
Judicial Watch should be regarded as a pariah, but they seem to be the go-to source for anything about Hillary. Why is that? When have they been right about any of their outrageous interpretations of anything they’ve claimed about the Clintons?
Grr…
Thanks again.
Cheers,
Scott.
TriassicSands
Unfortunately, the purpose of a headline is to get people to read — or at least start to read — an article. Almost no one would read the proposed headline’s story.
rikyrah
This was a wonderful post. Thanks for taking the time to point out the lunacy. Bravo.
trnc
Anybody can allege any goddamn thing they want, NYT is obligated to run just cuz known liars screamed something? Especially when every story that carries a sinister headline also has some form of, “No illegal activity has been found.”
JR in WV
Well, if it bleeds it leads isn’t just a TV slogan. It obviously works at the NYT as well. I grew up in a small town newsroom, surrounded by stories and editorials being written and published that frequently caused a lot of push back, including libel lawsuits and advertising boycotts.
The advertising boycotts were caused by stories about segregation and civil rights workers being beaten by cops. The libel suits were caused by calling crooked local politicians crooks.
The small town paper survived the boycott, and won the libel suit at the Supreme Court, after being found guilty by a jury and the crooked pol was awarded $1, yes, just one dollar. I don’t recall how much they spent on the appeal to the Supremes, but I know they thought it was cheap at twice the price.
That headline was sweet to publish.
The Times’s hostility to the Clintons is difficult to watch showing in their news coverage as blatantly as it does. That stuff is supposed to be on the editorial pages, not daily on the front page! Crooked pols running (and ruining) what was once a fine institution, that now doesn’t deserve the name of journalism.
Real editors would make sure that the shadows and clouds over the Clinton campaign were dispelled by the sunshine of real journalism. The NYT evidently has none of that kind of editor left.
You did a great job on that one story, the NYT is running two or three of those at a time. How can you hope to keep up with them? Best of luck!!
waysel
Yes, thank you,Tom, for your valiant effort.
MariedeGournay
Semi-lurker signing on to just say this is a wonderful post. Rhetorical criticism at its finest.
amk
One, the thug has been running on total bs for over a year and yet these ‘journos’ started ‘looking into him’ only in May.
Two, then they dropped the ‘major, damning, utterly critical stories’ and deepsixed them.
Fucking fifth columnists.
Ruckus
@redshirt:
We really aren’t. The structure still works, but half the janitors are clogging the toilets rather than cleaning up. We need to hire better janitors and make sure they do their jobs even half way reasonable.
trnc
@CaseyL: Good for you, especially pointing out that media consumers consume the media that is delivered. I think that the media sometimes get the blame for things that readers/viewers should understand without being spoon fed, but sinister headlines that are undermined by story content are unconscionable.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ruckus:
Thank you. Doom and despair are not the way to go into September when our candidate is leading.
Feathers
Thanks for all your hard work on this.
Perhaps the best way to explain this to them is through recent developments in what is the best way, cognitively, to learn something. Although the research is based on learning a language, or an academic subject, the same rules undoubtedly apply to news stories. Recalling the Clinton “scandals” to mind, even with just the headlines, is causing readers to recall what they read (learned) in the past, embedding the story more deeply and in a larger way in their memory, even if no significant new material has been added to the overall story, even if the article itself turns out to be a nothingburger.
This sort of storytelling, and journalism really is storytelling, no matter what reporters may tell themselves, by its nature, has a greater impact than the large single day, deep dive that reporters pride themselves on. When it has been written, they seem to consider the job done, not realizing that it will fade away from most reader’s minds, unless it is followed by several follow up stories bringing small new developments.
The educational design course I took has woven into my life in strange ways.
Ruckus
@Steeplejack:
There might also be that diplomatic passports have different status than a regular passport. The person with a diplomatic passport is a representative of the foreign government, a regular passport holder is not. In a trip to someplace like NK that would be an important difference. And can a person with a standard passport even officially visit NK?
Tom Levenson
@Belafon: Noether’s a great subject (and there was a really fine feature article on her not so long ago that I read and can’t remember where). But my problem: a) my German is asymptotically close to non-existent. b) Writing about math is freaking hard, and though I’ve done some, it’s not my most comfortable beat…and c) I’ve got the next five years or so of writing projects lined up.
Tom Levenson
@Feathers: This is exactly right, and the crux of my argument that I’m trying to put before some reporters. Their value system rates big, comprehensive, deeply researched and long articles. But you’re exactly right: from the readers’ point of view, a story’s importance and its impact (effect on a reader’s worldview) turns on how much the story is sustained over time.
Matt McIrvin
@Belafon: Physicists all know about her epochal theorem relating symmetries and conservation laws, but that’s all they know; she actually did a lot of important work in abstract algebra.
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
Try the veal and don’t forget to tip your servers.
People have been telling me to have a positive attitude lately and I tell them I do. The world is not in more shit than at other times in my life, our political system isn’t really broken, we just hired some real assholes and said assholes are holding their collective breaths. The way to fix it is to show the people hiring the real assholes that doing that is against all their best interests. And this will take someone on their side of the aisle either fucking up horribly (Trump) or several periods of actual democratic rule to where the evidence is so obvious that even a blind man could see it.
Feathers
@Tom Levenson: As I said, I took an educational design class and there is research showing that small reminders over time is what creates lasting memories. It’s late, but I’ll try to find the citations for you.
Marina Hirsch
The Time is driving me bananas. Hilary Clinton gave a ground-breaking speech, just the other day, on her plans for addressing the crisis of mental healthcare in the US. The Times just didn’t cover it. At all. This was news, and they ignored it. (If I’m wrong, please correct me. I did a search on the Times site after reading TPM: zip.)
The Times did do an important story on Trump’s tax plan and the lies thereof, which ran on the front page of the Business section. Should have been on the front page of the paper, above the fold.
I’ve never felt such intense despair over an election. The Times has a role to play, and it’s doing a lousy job. Thanks for trying, Professor Levenson.
Feathers
@Feathers: Wouldn’t let me edit. What I meant was – going to bed now, but will try to find my notes and get you the citation in the not too distant future.
Marina Hirsch
BTW: http://washingtonmonthly.com/2016/09/02/how-the-press-is-making-the-clinton-foundation-into-the-new-benghazi/
Tom Levenson
@Feathers: Thanks. Would be a great help.
ET
I knew I recognized the Vedder image.
joel hanes
Ach, du lieber Kukushinski!
Our Mr. Levenson has just picked a fight with someone who buys ink by the moby unit.
Wasn’t there a list ? Something about land war in Asia, playing poker with a guy named “Doc”, eating at a place called “Mom’s”, going up against a Sicilian … wasn’t this about #8 on that list?
joel hanes
fascinating case of comment moderation
was it something I said ?
Feathers
@Tom Levenson: Sorry to keep adding on, but the main crux of the ed design class was that the normal way of doing teaching (or by extension journalism) is exactly backwards.
The tendency is to try to explain to the reader/learner exactly what it is for them to know. They will absorb the knowledge you emit. If you really want readers/learners to truly learn something, what you must do is (taking cognition, human nature, etc, into account) create an experience which will cause them to attain the knowledge that you want them to carry into the future. One interesting note, fiction, both written and filmed, is created with the aim of creating an experience in the reader/viewer. That is why it is usually so much more memorable. Journalists complain about journalism as entertainment, but if they took it seriously as teaching, this might be the way to go forward.
Tom Levenson
@joel hanes: Ahhh…but I have all the pixels I need!
LesGS
@joel hanes: Yes. It looks like your comment has been released, but you used a word for a card game which sends your comments into moderation.
PPCLI
I’m late to the thread, but I wanted to thank you for this compelling analysis.
Here’s a link to a discussion in a Washington Post blog which covers similar territory, and complements your analysis. I imagine you’ve already had it drawn to your attention, but just in case you missed it, here it is:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/09/02/heres-a-tale-of-two-scandals-guess-which-one-will-get-more-play/?utm_term=.dd0ea3b330f0
Ruckus
@Feathers:
This is why learning by doing gets better results than reading/listening. It’s not that reading misses the point it’s that for the vast majority it has better meaning when learned by doing. For most people learning by reading/listening is abstract and tying it all together never registers. Learning by doing makes that abstract a bit or a lot more real.
Raven Onthill
The New York Times has supported every damnfool war of my lifetime. Sometimes they have changed their mind after the country is in a huge mess and losing, but first, far as I remember, the support. The rot goes deep there. The NYT is one of the few remaining news outlets that has the resources to do serious reporting, send people into the field, and so on. It would be nice if their publisher showed some signs of social responsibility.
different-church-lady
I am not in a good frame of mind to have any perspective tonight, and what’s really really spooking me is the idea that the country is going to go, “Hillary did something slightly hinky with her e-mail in a way we barely comprehend, so we’re just going to go ahead and elect an out and out racist idiot asshole bully sociopath.”
And the New York Fuckin’ Times is going to help that happen.
ding
with apologies to GARY PUCKETT AND THE UNION GAP
Times oh Times
Have you got bias on your mind, on your mind
Something’s wrong between us
That your buried graph cannot hide
And your afraid to let context be your guide
And lately when I read you, I know your not being wise
Times oh Times
Have you got bias on your mind, on you mind
I’ve seen the way the alt-right plays you
When they think I don’t see
And it hurts to have them think your that kind
But its knowing that you favor them that’s really killing me
Times oh Times
Have you got bias on your mind, on you mind
A paper prints a certain style
When she is in decline
And the alt-right can always feed her lies
I hate to have to say it
But that style is all over you
Times oh Times
Have you got bias on your mind, on you mind
Times oh Times
Have you got bias on your mind, on you mind
justawriter
Dear God Like Personage
I don’t know what you changed, but I approve of your reasons for doing so.
signed,
an apostate acolyte
daves09
The general coverage of the election is bringing me to the edge-and maybe a little further- of despair.
In 2012 I had AA friends who were sure Obama would lose, I always knew he would win. This time I’m spooked, it seems insane, but we live in an insane world. And the MSM just don’t care.
But thanks for this great post-I’m just sorry it didn’t make me feel any better or more reassured.
KlareCole
Tom, your argument was in depth & excellent. I hope the reporter whose ear you have, will give your thoughts very serious consideration. Thank you for your efforts. And to scale up on your position, the bigger story is not only the constant raising questions about Hillary, but not continuing to hammer on their own reporting about Trump. . NYT has written about Trump’s $650 mil debt to China, Russia, Goldman Sachs, to name a few of his corporate debts. That big foreign debt is a massive conflict of interest for a presidential candidate or president. Maybe he is simply running to get lower interest or some debt forgiven. What will he trade of our precious country for that? We don’t know. But there is no drip, drip, drip of questions being raised, clouds and shadows being repeatedly cast by our paper of record.
I know that Hillary’s drip cycle comes from the FBI, Judicial watch, Drudge, and other non-NYT sources. But wouldn’t balance be to pursue Trumps corporations, their debt & investments as conflicts of interest with real and potential pay to play on a much larger scale than even the Bondi-Trump U affair. And the balance bit is clearly skewed as you point out. It seems that at the top decision level of NYT, they believe the Fox News line, that Hilary is crooked & untrustworthy. It’s as if they have been mushed brained by the propaganda too.
You have my complete admiration for your efforts. I wish there were some way all we Juicers could help, because this is like trying to turn the Titanic. It is not rational for the Times to beat on Hillary more than Trump, especially over a charity that helps millions and to ignore Trump’s debt. So your perspective is right on to me. But to scale it up, I think that the Times and MSM as a whole needs to do the drip thing on Trumps debt and corporate conflicts as relentlessly as they have beat the email & CGI drum. Because it would be hard to say to Trump, as Bernie did to Hillary about her emails, that ‘I’m tired of hearing about your damn pay to play with your debt and China and Russia.’ Because, even if it were only the appearance of such a pay to play, it is a very obvious and very profoundly dangerous conflict.
Tim Wayne
The posters note at the top of this post should be moved the bottom of the post. It’s presence at the top, in bold, completely derails the flow.
Betty Cracker
Bravo, Tom!
Barney
So you’re writing a book on the South Sea Bubble, Tom – excellent! I’m reading Newton and the Counterfeiter now, and I was thinking “he could explain the South Sea Bubble really well, I’m sure”. When I researched my family tree, I found out one relative had been a director of the South Sea Company (Robert Chester, best known for a “my fellow directors and I are paragons of virtue who have in no way inflated the stock price, nor had dubious dealings in the shares” speech which quelled the unease for a short time, but turned out to be a load of porkies).
You make the case against the New York Times well. I look forward to your writings on the Hollow Blade Sword Company, and the “company for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is”.
Keith G
Thanks Tom. I appreciate your efforts here!!
debbie
Thank you for your edits as mentioned at the top of the thread. I hate when good people do stupid things in the heat of the moment.
low-tech cyclist
Coming to the party a bit late, but the main thing is:
Big contributions help people gain access to politicians. That’s legal, and it’s the norm.
Maybe it shouldn’t be legal, and it would be great to live in a world where it wasn’t the norm, but that’s not the world we live in. Rich or well-connected people (e.g. execs and lobbyists representing big corporatons) also get way more access than people like us, even if they don’t open their checkbooks.
If the NYT or WaPo did a big story about every instance where wealth, influence, and money got access, even if they limited their coverage to President/VP/Cabinet/Senator/Governor/SCOTUS, there’d be no reporter in the U.S. that was out of a job, and the J-schools would be booming to feed the demand. And they’d have to buy a bunch of new server farms to hold all the content.
IOW, money for access – at least, individual instances of it – is the ultimate nothingburger of a story. (If they’re going to do an exposé of the evils of money-for-access across the board, that would be different. But that’s not what I see here, nor do I expect it’s coming.) Unless they’ve got at least some evidence that money bought more than access, they need to STFU.
And at the very least, they need to prioritize their access stories. OK, suppose Doug Band had been a donor, and had gotten a special passport. That would be about the biggest thing yet to come out of this steady drumbeat of Clinton Foundation stories – and as corruption goes, it’s about an 0.02 on a scale from 0 to 10.
Meanwhile, the stories of Trump’s Russia connections came and went, and didn’t get anything like the same degree of being investigated and followed up, day after day after day. We still have no idea about how dependent Trump is on Russian investment, and if he needs their money at all, that’s a Big Fucking Deal. So where’s the NYT drumbeat on this story?
Or, now that the Trump Foundation had to do something about the fact that they’d made an illegal contribution to Pam Bondi’s campaign, shouldn’t this be a hook for further investigation into just how far along Florida’s investigation of Trump University was, and what they’d found, and the circumstances of Pam Bondi’s dropping Florida’s investigation? They always say, there’s nothing to hang a new story on, well, there it is.
To me, this seems like an open-and-shut case. They’re creating a steady drumbeat of Clinton Foundation nothingburger stories, just as they previously did with Benghazi and the email server. But there’s no drumbeat about any of Trump’s more serious scandals – just a few days’ worth of stories before each one gets dropped again.
low-tech cyclist
@PPCLI:
Looks like Waldman did a nice job comparing the Clinton Foundation coverage to what is sure to be a very brief, in passing, wave of the hands at the latest Trump/Bondi story.
low-tech cyclist
@Matt McIrvin:
I’m a (lapsed) mathematician, not a physicist, so I’m unfamiliar with Noether’s work in physics. But you’re right, she’s a BFD in abstract algebra, where a rather important class of rings is named after her.
PPCLI
@low-tech cyclist: Fun fact: in the ’80s and ’90s (and maybe still — I hope so) the UC Berkeley women’s math graduate student group was called the “Noetherian Ring”.
Epicurus
Five-star post, Mr. Levenson, and as always, I enjoy your taste in art immensely. I just popped in to say that if there were more “moderation” and “editing,” many comment sites would be empty. Thank you for your hard work on this, and please don’t stop. We need Jon Stewart and Colbert to “Restore Sanity” to this country. You have made a good start here.
Carol
Tom,
Bravo for taking this issue on!
Have you read this from Vox: Confessions of a Clinton reporter and this one by Matthew Yglesias, The New York Times’ latest Clinton Foundation “scandal” may be the dumbest one yet
You’re not alone in you fight.
The Lodger
@Feathers: Imagine a book in which every chapter starts with a clear understandable premise and then descends into an abyss of non sequiturs. You remember the premises but there’s never any proof. See Wealth and Poverty by George Gilder for an example.
aidian
Two thoughts, from one in the business:
1) I’d suggest a big reason why the NYT and other operations are doing so much on HRC’s email is because of the FBI investigation. It gives the imprint of authority on the story, and moves it from ‘could cover’ much closer to ‘must cover’ (of course the NYT doesn’t have the sort of staffing constraints where they’ve gotta worry about just handling the ‘must cover’ stories, but still). Of course Trump is involved in numerous actual scandals that involve actual lawbreaking, but AFAIK there aren’t any official investigations of those underway. That’s as much an indictment of the FBI and other agencies as it is of the NYT.
2) Daily news operations are primed to cover what’s new. There needs to be a news peg to hang the story on. In this case it’s the judicial watch email release — it’s something new and unreported in connection with an ongoing story. This is worth reporting. It ain’t front page news, but it’s worth reporting.
3) That headline is atrocious. The entire nexus of Clinton foundation/State Department is questionable – at least inasmuch as it shows how business works in Washington. But this isn’t the story to illustrate that. The headline still reads to me as ‘lazy copy editor’ rather than ‘symbol of editorial structure’s systemic bias.’ That’s not to say there isn’t systemic bias in the editorial structure of the NYT and other elite media operations. There is. I just don’t think that hed is a sign of it.
4) The role of the daily press isn’t to report the Truth. It’s to report the facts. You can’t do the Truth on a daily deadline. It’s up to other outlets (or at least other parts of the newsroom) to report the Truth. Unfortunately, we’ve lost a lot of those outlets (I don’t know what the state of the Spotlight team is at the Boston Globe, but I’d be shocked if it’s even half the size it was during the movie Spotlight).
All that said, this is an excellent criticism of a daily story, and good food for thought. It’s at least as good as most of what you’ll find in Columbia Journalism Review, and I hope it has an impact with lots of working journalists.
Blueskies
@aidian:
Judicial Watch having something bad to say about the Clintons it the ultimate in dog bites man non-story, yet you and the apparently many of your colleagues fall for it every time.
Why is that, Aidian?
RAM
Tom, if you’re still working on this project, Josh Marshall had a great piece this morning on TPM concerning the NYT’s total failure to cover the Trump pay-for-play with state attorneys general in Florida and Texas. As Marshall says, it’s about as cut and dried an example of the press ignoring Trump while afflicting Clinton as you can find.