2 2014: Chuck Todd and Friends Have Hillary Fatigue 1.0
As I noted in Chapter Didn’t Mueller, Chuck Todd did kind of telegraph the 2016 election all the way back in a Salon interview he did in 2014:
I already have Hillary fatigue.
“The biggest problem she has is that a ton of people in the media have Hillary fatigue. I don’t know if the grass-roots Democrats do; eight years ago they did, which is why they looked to Obama. People had Hillary fatigue — really Clinton fatigue — and were looking for a new direction. Now in the grass roots there’s some Clinton nostalgia, especially as Obama’s presidency looks shaky. But the Hillary fatigue in the press corps is going to be a challenge.”
Chuck Todd: “I wish we didn’t focus on the individual personalities of journalists” | Salon.com
This was unusual as Todd actually acknowledged it usually mainstream pundits just presume their own preferences and priors are the same as the larger public’s-like when Kasey Hunt asserted on the evening before Bill Barr’s fake exoneration memo in late March 2019 that people are tired of Mueller.
But this was a question that continued to hang over the media’s-simply atrocious-coverage of Clinton’s campaign in 2016. So often they would simply presume the public’s preferences and viewpoints. Again as I suggested in the last chapter, one reason to doubt the MSM narrative that Clinton was a terrible candidate is she actually was very popular before the media begun its relentlessly negative campaign coverage of her. Her approval rating had been very high during her four years as Secretary of State.
Then you had all those Benghazi hearings-remember Kevin McCarthy’s burbling: everyone said she was unbeatable, then we did a Select Committee, her numbers are dropping.’
The Benghazi hearings turned up nothing except the emails which led a media feeding frenzy the likes of which would be scarcely believable if many of us folks weren’t forced to see it ourselves in 2016. All day every day for months in the Spring and Summer of 2015 this was all anyone in the media-CNN, MSNBC-wanted to talk about. And the framing was the same on every show. Will she be indicted? When will she testify. She said she had two phones for ‘convenience’-why lie about this? Wow this is going to hurt her with voters. On the face of it why it would hurt so much was never clear-she used private email? So what? It was ironic that the GOP was leading the freakout over this seeing as they’re supposedly the party of radical libertarianism and as Peter Strozk noted in his own book of the Emailgate boondoggle-no he doesn’t call it that!-it’s quite possible that private email was more secure than the State department government email. Yet it was the GOP with its hair on fire over private email.
FN: Of course, now their hair is on fire over Hunter Biden violating gun control laws they themselves claim shouldn’t be on the books.
Beyond the fact, of course, that a number of the GOP Presidential candidates had also been revealed to use private email for their own public business-Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, et al.
Many 2016 hopefuls have used private email | HeraldNet.com
And-of course-the least of the sins of Trump’s illegitimate regime was the extensive use of private email-revelations of which led the media to yawn. Shocking-this had been the issue of our times in 2016.
No surprise, it turned out that Comey himself used private email while investigating Clinton for using private email in 2016.
IG: Comey used personal email account for FBI business | CNN Politics
What was amazing was almost everyone in the mainstream media had Emailgate fever. Indeed “even Chris Hayes”-in his interview with Clinton he saved for his last question if she feared going to prison. Which once again underscored how universal the media’s emailgate obsession was. Interestingly, Rachel Maddow as the only leading cable news host not obsessed with Her Emails-Maddow to the best I can recall didn’t mention them ONCE. This silence certainly spoke to something-though it would have been better if she spoke out against it. The fact she didn’t underscores how widely held the media’s obsession over what WaPo belatedly dismissed as a minor email scandal in 2016. By then, of course, the cows had long left the barn.
To be sure it was a good article just about a year too late.
Opinion | The Hillary Clinton email story is out of control – The Washington Post
By then 60% of Americans believed HRC should have been indicted post Comey’s Very Careless Presser.
Yglesias too spoke out about the absurdity of how central the faux Emailgate scandal drove campaign coverage.
Some time ago, Hillary Clinton and her advisers decided that the best course of action was to apologize for having used a personal email address to conduct government business while serving as secretary of state. Clinton herself was, clearly, not really all that remorseful about this, and it showed in her early efforts to address it. Eventually aides prevailed upon her to express a greater degree of regret, which they hoped would lay the issue to rest.
It did not. Instead, email-related talk has dogged Clinton throughout the election and it has influenced public perceptions of her in an overwhelmingly negative way. July polling showed 56 percent of Americans believed Clinton broke the law by relying on a personal email address with another 36 percent piling on to say the episode showed “bad judgments” albeit not criminality.”
To be clear apologizing was IMO a mistake-that only whets the Clinton hating pundits to double down on the demands for more answers over a scandal of which there was no there there-and as we’ll see in the FBI part of this book no actual probable cause either which means the real scandal of Emailgate was that it was opened in the first place.
Because Clinton herself apologized for it and because it does not appear to be in any way important, Clinton allies, surrogates, and co-partisans have largely not familiarized themselves with the details of the matter, instead saying vaguely that it was an error of judgment and she apologized and America has bigger fish to fry.
This has had the effect of further inscribing and reinscribing the notion that Clinton did something wrong, meaning that every bit of micro-news that puts the scandal back on cable amounts to reminding people of something bad that Clinton did. In total, network newscasts have, remarkably, dedicated more airtime to coverage of Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined.
This is unfortunate because emailgate, like so many Clinton pseudo-scandals before it, is bullshit. The real scandal here is the way a story that was at best of modest significance came to dominate the US presidential election — overwhelming stories of much more importance, giving the American people a completely skewed impression of one of the two nominees, and creating space for the FBI to intervene in the election in favor of its apparently preferred candidate in a dangerous way.
The real Clinton email scandal is that a bullshit story has dominated the campaign – Vox
This is why 2016 was seminal moment in a truly post truth election-as Roger Stone gloated after the fact.
FN: It should be noted that Stone published this initially in 2017 which focused on the fact that the mainstream media could no longer act as an umpire for truth-basically in 2016 people were freer to believe whatever they want, unencumbered by facts. In 2019 he repackaged the same book and renamed it as if he’d published a new book.
Indeed this problematic dynamic led Ezra Klein to discuss it in October, 2016 after the third debate-the issue of how the media likes to think it merely reports the news as a kind of court stenographer but in reality they always impose a narrative through framing and the narrative of 2016 was her private emails were the biggest atrocity in human history-judging by the tone you’d certainly imagine the Holocaust was not nearly as bad.
To be sure to an extent its inevitable that media reporting is going to impose some frame or other-if you’re reporting the news you’re always going to put a gloss on it in one direction or other-just in terms of what you choose to report. It’s like Quantum physics-the observer changes what is observed through the act of observation.
Klein discussed here the media’s tendency to put itself inside what it imagines goes on inside the voters’ head-aka their preference for horserace analysis-wow how will this play on Main St… among indies, etc.
The press thought Trump’s first 30 minutes were his best. They were his worst. – Vox
The press thought Trump’s first 30 minutes were his best. They were his worst.
The press needs to do its job, not the voters’ job
The media should inform voters, not try to reflect them
There’s a deep tension in the way the media judges presidential debates. On the one hand, we know that our coverage affects the public’s ultimate view of the event — in that way, we are key participants in the debate, not merely observers of it.
But that knowledge is uncomfortable. It’s not the role we are meant to play. The press wants to reflect reality, not shape it.
And so we attempt, peculiarly, to recast ourselves as observers of voter reactions we can’t observe. We judge the debate based not on what we think to be true about it but on what we think the public will think to be true about it. And so we end up asking not whether the candidates made good arguments given what we know to be true but whether they made good arguments given what we imagine voters know to be true. And once you’re in that mindset, a section where Trump sounded good can be a win even if nothing he said made sense — after all, fairly few voters are trade policy or labor market experts.
But the public isn’t relying on us to tell them what we thought they thought watching the debate. They’re relying on us to tell them what we found when we compared the candidates’ answers to reality, and to the best analysis on offer from experts, so they can make a better-informed judgment on what actually happened in the debate. And sometimes there’s a very big gap between how good a candidate’s answers sounded and how good his or her answers actually were.
That’s the case for Trump’s opening section last night. He was speaking on the issues where he’s supposed to be strongest — his whole pitch is he’s a businessman who knows how the economy really works and what is really needed to fix it — and he showed he didn’t have any real idea what he was talking about. Voters deserve to know that.
But this was how the media coverage was the entire 2016 election-and before and since.
Not only did Russia and James Comey’s FBI put its finger on the scale in favor of Trump so did the media. This led to a drop of 25 points in HRC’s approval rating during the course of an Emailgate freakout so intense that by September 2015 Chirs Cillizza had already written 60 different posts about Clinton’s emails by himself.
FN: Hillary noted this fact herself in What Happened?
Again this is why by the time WaPo did an op-ed in September 2016 about the fact that Emailgate had gotten way out of hand it was like a year late. At the end of the day the big picture of 2016 is that HRC was very popular and well liked as Secretary of State. Then the MSM had a major moral panic over a phony email scandal and insisted on every cable show every night that the American people won’t be able to trust Clinton over private emails-despite the fact that many other Presidential candidates in 2016 running in the Republican party also used private email and no one said anything at whatsoever driving down her numbers 25%.
Her coverage was truly hideous-hard to think of any other candidate in recent history who coverage anywhere near to being as treacherous as Hillary’s. Indeed, Klein wrote another incisive piece about this historically awful coverage.
Hillary Clinton’s “coal gaffe” is a microcosm of her twisted treatment by the media
She navigated a hall of mirrors”
Hillary Clinton’s “coal gaffe” is a microcosm of her twisted treatment by the media – Vox
What was doubly ironic is that the Bernie Bros had long cast dark aspersions of her being too cozy with the fossil fuel industry and yet would pile on along with Trump and the GOP co-conspirators alongside the MSM pundits.
“Back in March 2016, at a Democratic town hall in Ohio, Hillary Clinton made what was probably the best-known “gaffe” of her campaign. As part of an answer on energy policy, she said, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” This was immediately taken as a sign of her hostility to the working class and a confirmation of Democrats’ “war on coal.”
Not to quibble but her invoking of the “Deplorables” was also treated like a great gaffe-I never understood why seeing as it was based in fact.
FN: I mean anyone that leads a “Lock her up!” chant the night its reported that a psychopath hearing Trump’s deranged rhetoric sending Clinton and every other leading Congressional Dem in the country is deplorable.
Anyway-spoiler alert-she didn’t mean she was going to put them out of work rather that market forces were going to-indeed, had been doing so for years.
But the point Vox makes it that is no one who read her full statement ever believed this that it was a political hitjob.
Interpreted with even an iota of charity, in light of her record and commitments, even in light of the comments immediately preceding and following, Clinton was clearly trying to express concern for coal communities. To believe otherwise, you’d have to believe not only that she delights in putting Americans out of work but that she would boast about it publicly, like Dr. Evil, to the very people losing jobs. It’s ridiculous.
When her political opponents plucked that phrase out of context and spun it as hostile to coal communities, they were distorting her meaning. They were lying.
We really have to establish this point before moving on. It matters.
There is no reasonable debate on Clinton’s intent. Her disposition toward coal communities was clear to any fair-minded observer at the time; it was the theme of her answer; it was the focus of a major policy proposal.”
But nevertheless, this became yet another anti Hillary narrative-she hates people in coal country. Vox does a good job of documenting the etymology of how-yet another-anti Hillary narrative developed.
Interpreted with even an iota of charity, in light of her record and commitments, even in light of the comments immediately preceding and following, Clinton was clearly trying to express concern for coal communities. To believe otherwise, you’d have to believe not only that she delights in putting Americans out of work but that she would boast about it publicly, like Dr. Evil, to the very people losing jobs. It’s ridiculous.
When her political opponents plucked that phrase out of context and spun it as hostile to coal communities, they were distorting her meaning. They were lying.
We really have to establish this point before moving on. It matters.
There is no reasonable debate on Clinton’s intent. Her disposition toward coal communities was clear to any fair-minded observer at the time; it was the theme of her answer; it was the focus of a major policy proposal.”
From the media’s perspective, “Clinton garbled a sentence” is true but not particularly newsworthy. “Clinton boasted about putting coal miners out of work” is false but definitely newsworthy (and damaging to Clinton) if it were true. In other words, there’s no honest reason to make this “gaffe” a story at all.
“But Dave,” you’re saying. “This got covered everywhere, including the MSM. Are you saying they were all lying in order to damage Clinton?”
No. That’s not how the game works. The game works like this:
Right-wing operatives and media figures watch Clinton intensely. Anything she says or does that can be plausibly (or implausibly) spun to appear maleficent, they spin. A vast echo chamber of blogs, “news” sites, radio stations, cable news shows, and Facebook groups takes each one of these mini faux scandals and amplifies the signal.
If one of the faux scandals catches on enough and dominates right-wing media long enough, then a kind of alchemy occurs. The question facing mainstream outlets is not, “Why aren’t you writing about what Clinton said?” That question is easy to answer: It’s a nothingburger. The question becomes, “Why aren’t you writing about the scandal over what Clinton said?”
This is the basic process for faux Clinton scandals going back to Whitewater-not exactly a surprise it started at the NY Times…
But the media never needed its arm twisted very hard to go down another Whitewater cum who killed David Foster cum Benghazi cum But Her Emails anti Clinton rabbit hole. As noted above, Waldman had warned in 2015 that the media was going to be HRC’s primary opponent-she had to beat not just Bernie and Trump but the punditocracy. He made the crucial point that the media always felt that the Clintons had “gotten away with something” though no one could ever explain exactly what that was.
So the media didn’t exactly have to be dragged kicking and screaming into yet another Clinton moral panic.
As Klein argues the media habitually denies that it does more than simply report the news-that it-necessarily-also frames it. But by 2016 the mainstream media itself seemed to have not much less Clinton Derangement Syndrome than the GOP co-conspirators. Precisely because it had followed the Far Right down so many boondoggles-talk about fools for scandal
Fools for Scandal: How The Media Invented Whitewater: Lyons, Gene: 9781879957527: Amazon.com: Books
that by 2016 they were determined to finally validate all their years of chasing faux Clinton scandals. What was fascinating about Emailgate was after it successfully defeated THAT WOMAN the media lost interest in the private emails over night.
After the election the mainstream narrative on Clinton was she lost because she was a “terrible candidate” who didn’t go to Michigan the last week of the election. They couldn’t admit their own outsized road in her defeat. To be sure, it was the Comey Letter that was winning shot to defeat this woman they had such disdain for. But it was the absurd levels of focus on Emailgate going back to March 2015, culminating in the freakout over the Comey Letter that made this possible.
Indeed, as we’ll see in the Max Blumenthal chapter, he would complain that the media wasn’t as irresponsible with a link to what was alleged to be documents from Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020-he was disappointed Trump wasn’t reelected in the same way he’d been the first time-the weaponization of a phony scandal.