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UPDATE:
Transferred to new manuscript
For the most part the media who constantly demands Hillary Clinton ‘accept responsibility’ and ‘do some introspection’ has done little of it on its own part regarding its terrible 2016 coverage. It’s ridiculous weaponization of a fake email scandal-we know it’s fake as a number of high ranking Trump staffers use private email-which will finally be investigated when Elijah Cummings heads the House Oversight Committee next month-and this has gotten very little coverage and that Trump regularly speaks to world leaders on his unsecure Android for all the world to hear at Mar-a-Lago-and as we learn in (Chapter A) the Chinese regularly listen in, indeed, he regularly discusses classified information with Sean Hannity and this has not been treated like a very big deal- the media’s willingness to always assume the worst possible explanation of any faux Clinton scandal-remember that NY Times piece on the Clinton Foundation in September, 2016 with its scandalous headlines, and nothing in the actual story justified it?-and it’s complicity in not worrying where the DNC leaks and Podesta emails came from, just eagerly reporting on the content-doing just as Putin had helpfully suggested.
FN: Cummings’ Oversight has been investigating the emails-with zero cooperation from the Administration; it’s not clear how far the investigation has actually gotten-and typical for the House Democrats there has been no public hearings or information regarding.
One thing the Democratic leadership has so far not been at all good at is generating public interest in their investigations and hearings. But then if you accept the premise of yesterday’s piece in Politico’s Playbook this utter lack of publicity is a feature in the mind of Pelosi and Friends. While one major zombie argument for not impeaching the faux ‘President’ is that it will play into his hands and somehow actually benefit him politically.
But in the above mentioned Playbook piece apparently these Dem leaders also fear impeaching Trump if it’s not beneficial to him-they actually fear impeaching him and then having him lose. So while they’ve claimed they think impeachment will help Trump they actually worry even if it hurts him.
This is simply surreal-Pellosi has claimed that to impeach Trump they have to bring the country along but how do you do that without any public exposure?-and it’s becoming tougher not to look at the support that I and many in the Dem base gave to Pelosi to be Speaker again as a major mistake.
End of FN.
The media remains very married to the bad candidate canard regarding Clinton-as we see in (Chapter B) Alan Litchman, one of the few analysts to predict Trump, didn’t base it on her allegedly being a ‘bad candidate’ but rather the structural fact that it’s very tough for an incumbent party to win the third term-and the economy was only middling. Interesting how now that Trump is ‘President’ the economy is now being treated as if its phenomenal-despite the fact that wage growth remains weak-
FN: In any case the economy is performing largely the way it did under Obama.
As we see in later chapters in this part of the book, the media’s Clinton Derangement Syndrome has not abated after their bad coverage cost her the election-Emailgate via Comey’s letter couldn’t have taken her down if the media hadn’t so weaponized it-and the coverage of the letter weren’t so hysterical.
There have been a few individual exceptions to this and Hillary relates in her own book (Chapter D) that some journalists have privately apologized to her. Katy Tur in her book on the election seems to at least admit that the media really soft pedaled Russiagate prior to the election.
But as far as the media admitting the fact that-yes, it has blood on its hands-as I was warning many of them on Twitter after Comey’s letter-Amy Choznick in her book Waiting for Hillary has been the only one willing to face this fact head on.
I think this, from The New York Times' Amy Chozick, is the most detailed and direct admission from someone on the 2016 Clinton beat that journalists were played by Russia. https://t.co/rJI6GmYiqG pic.twitter.com/MYzuUA0rhI
— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) April 20, 2018
Choznick reports Clinton’s reaction when Robby Mook gave her the bad news-she had ‘lost’-sorry but it will forever have an asterisk next to it. I knew it-they were never going to let me be President.
“Things were already looking bad when, several people told me, Chelsea Clinton popped the Champagne. It was just after 9 p.m. on election night and she was having her hair and makeup done in the family’s suite at the Peninsula hotel. She stopped to pour what someone said was Veuve Clicquot into everyone’s glasses, figuring that in a couple of hours Donald Trump’s run of early victories in red states (West Virginia, Oklahoma, Alabama) would end and the map would turn back in her mom’s favor.
“Three hours later, the Rust Belt was awash in red, and somebody had to tell Hillary Clinton.”
“Robby Mook, the drained and deflated campaign manager, told his boss she was going to lose. She didn’t seem all that surprised.”
“I knew it. I knew this would happen to me,” she said, now within a couple of inches of Mr. Mook’s ashen face. “They were never going to let me be president.”
“In July 2013, Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of The New York Times, put me on the “Hillary beat” ahead of the 2016 election. It was 649 days before Mrs. Clinton would announce she was running for president again, 1,226 days before she would lose to Mr. Trump.”
“Every major life decision in my 20s and 30s — when to get married, where to buy an apartment, whether to freeze my eggs until after the election — had revolved around a single looming question: What about Hillary Clinton?”
“I figured that if anyone knew whom Mrs. Clinton was referring to with that insidious “they” that, like some invisible army of adversaries (real and imagined), wielded its collective power and caused her to lose the most winnable presidential election in modern history, it was me.”
“They were the vast-right wing conspiracy. They were the patriarchy that could never let an ambitious former first lady finally shatter “that highest, hardest glass ceiling.” They were the people of Wisconsin and James Comey. They were white suburban women who would rather vote for a man who bragged about sexual assault than a woman who seemed an affront to who they were.”
Of course, many of ‘them’ were also at the FBI-aka Trumpland-and then there was Russia and Julian Assange.
But among MSM journalists, Choznick alone, doesn’t flinch from the truth:
“And yes, they were political reporters (“big egos and no brains,” she called us) hounding her about her emails and transfixed by the spectacle of the first reality TV show candidate.”
“It’s dizzying to realize that without even knowing it, you’ve ended up on the wrong side of history. Months after the election, every time I heard the words “Russia” and “collude,” this realization swirled in my head, enveloping everything.”
Yes, like the SNL Erin Burnett-no matter what we learned about Trump-Russia, the Muslim ban, denying he knew who the KKK was after it endorsed him, it was always ‘but what about your emails, Secretary Clinton?’
Choznick then recounts October 7, 2016, a very important date for a number of reasons; indeed it was such a significant point in the election that Yahoo did a huge deep dive called 64 hours that covered the time period from when the Hollywood Access video came out to the debate two days later.
When the video came out it was widely wondered if this could be the end of Trump’s campaign-reportedly, Reince Priebus had urged him to leave the race at that point, very few defended him-with the exception of a couple Deplorables like Rudy Giuliani. But in a perverse way it may have helped him-or at least it blunted the impact of the statement the intel agencies put out regarding Russia’s interference in the election-DHS, the DNI, the CIA, etc. all minus Comey who demurred because it was too close to the election.
Again, irony was last seen on the unemployment line.
Then, three hours after the video came out, Wikileaks begun releasing the stolen Podesta emails. This could also be very important regarding collusion-did Assange discuss the timing with the campaign? As we see in (Chapter E) two days after Peter Smith had a very interesting email exchange that makes you wonder if his Russian hackers could have been behind the Podesta emails.
Back to Choznick:
“And the strange thing is, Oct. 7, 2016, started just like any other day.”
“The Times newsroom had been quiet that afternoon. Then, around 4 p.m., I heard “Oh, my God,” and “Oh, God,” and “Jesus Christ” float from cubicle to cubicle until my largely agnostic colleagues sounded like a Sunday church choir. The Washington Post had published video of the Republican nominee for president bragging about sexually assaulting women.”
“I stared into my screen, as frozen as the paused image of Mr. Trump and Billy Bush stepping off the bus, the unknowing actress in the fuchsia halter dress waiting to greet them.”
I was still in this haze at 4:32 p.m. when WikiLeaks tweeted a link to emails from the Gmail account of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, including excerpts from her speeches to Wall Street firms.
Mrs. Clinton’s refusal to release the speeches had been such a cause célèbre in the Democratic primary that I regularly saw protesters holding signs that said, “I’d rather be at home reading your Goldman Sachs speeches.” Now the juicy parts of this most sought-after trove of documents had landed in our laps.
“But it wasn’t a scoop. It was more like a bank heist.”
“Editors and reporters huddled to discuss how to handle the emails. Everyone agreed that since the emails were already out there — and of importance to voters — it was The Times’s job to “confirm” and “contextualize” them. I didn’t argue that it appeared the emails were stolen by a hostile foreign government that had staged an attack on our electoral system. I didn’t push to hold off on publishing them until we could have a less harried discussion. I didn’t raise the possibility that we’d become puppets in Vladimir Putin’s master plan. I chose the byline.”
And this was a choice-as she makes clear. When I was occasionally able to get MSM pundits on Twitter to respond to my criticism of their coverage during the election they always responded obtusely: well what can we do, not report the news? This is something that one major journalist, Ezra Klein did discuss at the time-as we noted in (Chapter F): the media’s pretense that it has no discretion, that it can only ‘report the news’ rather than the fact that there are so many plausible stories it could cover every day that discretion in what to lead with, what to focus on, what stories to follow up on make a huge difference. Klein documented the media’s discomfiture with the fact that it isn’t the simple passive vessel of the news it likes to poise as.
So the media didn’t have to amplify the Comey letter one thousandfold-it could have chosen to amplify it just one hundredfold or tenfold-or even treat it like a normal story that gets one or two stories on A16 and call it a day. Regarding Comeygate, as noted in (Chapter G) the media has mostly discussed it very little as opposed to Russiagate-no doubt Comeygate in a sense hits closer to home as they did so much to foment it with their email obsession. There have been just a few exceptions: the NYTimes and Vanity Fair did deep dives into Comeygate in May, 2017 for some reason-just before Comey was fired.. But then, neither did any followups. That-again-was a choice. It could have lead to more digging, more investigating, more exposes-but they chose not to do so, for whatever reason.
Again, the media-despite the talk of ‘how can you tell us we shouldn’t report the news?-has very wide discretion about not just which stories to run but what page-or what leads on cable news-and how many followup stories-if any.
The media didn’t have to amplify Wikileaks stolen Podesta emails-they didn’t amplify the Sony hacks in 2015 or Wikileaks hacked trove of CIA documents in 2017-just like the French press didn’t report at all on the MacronLeaks-it’s their policy to have no election coverage the last 72 hours before an election. It’s also, notable, of course, that the media started taking Russiagate seriously, almost immediately after the election.
“In December, after the election, my colleagues in Washington wrote a Pulitzer-winning article about how the Russians had pulled off the perfect hack. I was on the F train on my way to the newsroom when I read it. I had no new assignment yet and still existed in a kind of postelection fog that took months to lift. I must’ve read this line 15 times: “Every major publication, including The Times, published multiple stories citing the D.N.C. and Podesta emails posted by WikiLeaks, becoming a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence.”
UPDATE:
Very interesting documentation of years of ‘the Dukes’-years of Russian cyberattacks, etc
The Dukes: 7 Years Of Russian Cyber-Espionage – F-Secure Blog
“The Bernie Bros and Mr. Trump’s Twitter trolls had called me a donkey-faced whore and a Hillary shill, but nothing hurt worse than my own colleagues calling me a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence. The worst part was, they were right.”
So far so good. Of course, Choznick has to dilute it by insisting that if Clinton weren’t a ‘flawed candidate’ none of this would have mattered.
“Of course, these outside forces wouldn’t have mattered or weighed so heavily on me, on the country, had Hillary Clinton, her campaign and her longtime aides — the same box of broken toys who’d enabled all of her worst instincts since the 1990s — not let the election get so close in the first place. The Russians, after all, didn’t hack into her calendar and delete the Wisconsin rallies.”
What’s missed is that they called Al Gore and John Kerry a ‘flawed candidate’ as well and it’s quite dubious that had it been Biden rather than herself he wouldn’t have been called ‘flawed’-there are a lot of skeletons in his closet-from plagiarism in 1988-of course, Melania Trump plagiarized Michelle Obama’s speech but the media always judges Democrats more harshly for the same conduct-his vote in 1982 to overturn Roe v. Wade; indeed, if any one vote was used to prove Hillary wasn’t ‘a true progressive’ it was her vote for the Iraq vote; Biden voted for that too, and unlike her, he voted for that really bad bill in support of the credit card companies in 2005 eliminating Chapter 11 for many debtors.
UPDATE: After the first debate Tulsi Gabbard defended Biden’s vote for the Iraq War. This is something she’d never have considered doing in a million years for Hillary Clinton-rather she and the rest of the allegedly True Progressives-chastigated her and argued that this one vote by itself was disqualifying.
UPDATE 2.0: Here in 2024 the media has now once again changed its narrative. Biden is now-once again-a “flawed candidate” according to the mainstream punditocracy. It’s very interesting how this has evolved throughout the years. In 2012 Biden as Obama’s VP was such a “flawed candidate”-it was seriously asserted that Biden could sink the top of the ticket and so Obama should replace Joe with: yep, Hillary Clinton.
Then in 2016 they switched places-now HRC was “flawed” Biden was built up as the Democrat’s savior-it’s amazing how the narrative of a flawed candidate who “can’t connect” with the public recurs with just the naes changing. Now in 2024 Biden is flawed again and supposedly the Dems desperately need to do drop Joe for-pretty much anybod.