No argument with what you say, Miriam. In fact, that is what I'm
railing against. Why is it that we Humans are more focused on the
person's supposed qualities and short comings, rather than on the
underlying issues for which they stand?
Anyway, I'm not fretting too much since I do the same thing very often.
Not seeing them, I still am taken more by Hillary's voice than by that
smug, self confident voice of Donald Trump. I voted in 2008 for Barak
Obama, even knowing that I would probably get just exactly what we
got, because I thought he had a far more listenable voice than George
Bush, and a far more intelligent voice than John McCain. But I've
never kidded myself into thinking I knew any of them.
In fact, as I've said before, even though they do not have my
interests at heart, I have great respect for the Clinton's ability to
survive and prosper in the sea of hatred that seems to flow around
them. But that will not be enough to sway my vote for Hillary
Clinton.
Are you folks on the East Coast faced with another heavy storm?
Here's hoping your lights and power stay on. We are in a moderately
cooling period. Mid 60's to low 70's for a high, with drippy sky, and
mid 50's at night, except for 45 degrees night before last. I seem to
be finally mending, after bringing home whatever bug I picked up last
May in Arizona. Lots of congestion. For a while I thought I'd caught
my sister's Mersa, but then I always did lean toward every little
sniffle being some exotic disease.
What I am really avoiding is dealing with the fact that this body is
81 years old, and was not too well cared for in earlier years.
Still, I hold out hope that I will be around to welcome in 2035.
Cathy and I invited an old client of ours, and her daughter to have
lunch at our home. Edith just turned 103. She authored a novel that
she published after her 100th birthday. I think it is entitled,
Branches and Twigs. Her name is Edith Kapka. The Talking Book and
Braille Library has not yet put it on cartridge, but it's available on
Amazon. Edith is from Hungary, and her story is based on her
experiences during the Second World War. She had a dear friend who
was Jewish. The story is based on the direction each was taken by the
times. While Cathy and I spend most of our waking time, and all of
our sleeping time together, she has not yet had the time to read me
the book. But one fine day...
Stay well,
Carl
On 9/7/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Carl,
The problem is that although you, and perhaps, many other people, feel that
all of these articles and news stories are distracting the public from the
real issues that our country has to face, the election is first and foremost
in the news and on the minds of people. So it does matter how the news is
covered and whether the shortcomings of the presidential candidates are
fairly reported. Of the people who vote, most will choose one of the two
major candidates. And the images of the candidates that are projected, are
more real to most voters than the actual people running for office. I
noticed in a novel I began reading last night which has nothing to do with
politics, that when the author was describing one of the female characters,
she mentioned that she wore "a Hillary head band" which, I suppose was
showing the character's feminist leanings.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, September 07, 2016 10:32 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: James Jarvis; Matthew
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: [blind-democracy]
All fun and games.
But one thing should be cleared up. Neither Trump nor Clinton are Leaders.
Period! End of subject.
What they are is reflectors.Or should that be, what they is are
reflectors...
But anyway, we're spending far too much time, energy and billionaires
dollars on talking about Clinton and Trump. Our Working Class attention
should be focused on what each of them embodies, not on who they themselves
are.
What does it matter how many hard working contractors Donald Trump screwed
out of their well deserved pay? What difference is there in where Hillary
Clinton sent her "secret" messages?
Trump represents a part of our American society that is plain and simply
ugly. Greed runs this segment of our America. Trump is merely one of
hundreds, no better, no worse. Vote for Trump and vote for corruption,
graft, greed and the end of what little freedom we have left.
Hillary Clinton reflects a different segment of our America. This is the
slick, smooth, double talking opportunists who will say anything and promise
the moon in order to clamber to the top of the heap. The Clinton's are not
the stars of this segment, but they certainly have been successful. Despite
constant attack, starting, in my memory, with White Water, the effort to
discredit and destroy them has been unmerciful...and not very successful.
The Clinton dynasty appears to be headed for never before records, two
presidents from the same couple, and the first woman president, and the
first First Gentleman.
So never forget just how bright these two people are. They are not to be
mistaken for supporters of the Working Class, nor, for that matter of any
particular group whose name does not begin with Clinton. But they are
bright, and they are survivors.
Meanwhile, back with the Working Class. We are like a slow waking, drugged
giant beginning to stir after many years of semiconscious lethargy. How
much longer we will languish before we shake off the effects of the poisons
injected into our brains by the Corporate Mass Media, one can only guess.
But it does look as if there is a glimmer of light on the distant horizon,
the beginning of a new dawn. What we do now in preparing to meet this new
day will depend upon how well we prepare for it. There are fields to plow,
seeds to plant and weeds to be pulled before we can claim a better world.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/7/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The
Intercept_
Glenn _Greenwald
✉
⎕
Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The Unrelenting Pundit-Led Effort to Delegitimize All Negative
Reporting About Hillary Clinton Glenn Greenwald
Glenn Greenwald
Sep. 6 2016, 10:53 a.m.
Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
In his New York Times column yesterday, Paul Krugman did something
that he made clear he regarded as quite brave: He defended the
Democratic Party presidential nominee and likely next U.S. president
from journalistic investigations. Complaining about media bias,
Krugman claimed that journalists are driven by “the presumption that
anything Hillary Clinton does must be corrupt, most spectacularly
illustrated by the increasingly bizarre coverage of the Clinton
Foundation.” While generously acknowledging that it was legitimate to
take a look at the billions of dollars raised by the Clintons as
Hillary pursued increasing levels of political power — vast sums often
received from the very parties most vested in her decisions as a
public official — it is now “very clear,” he proclaimed, that there was
absolutely nothing improper about any of what she or her husband did.
Krugman’s column, chiding the media for its unfairly negative coverage
of his beloved candidate, was, predictably, a big hit among Democrats
— not just because of their agreement with its content but because of
what they regarded as the remarkable courage required to publicly
defend someone as marginalized and besieged as the former first lady,
two-term New York senator, secretary of state, and current
establishment-backed multimillionaire presidential front-runner.
Krugman — in a tweet proclamation that has now been re-tweeted more
than 10,000 times — heralded himself this way: “I was reluctant to
write today’s column because I knew journos would hate it. But it felt
like a moral duty.”
As my colleague Zaid Jilani remarked: “I can imagine Paul Krugman
standing in front of the mirror saying, ‘This is *your Tahrir Square*
big guy.’” Nate Silver, early yesterday morning, even suggested that
Krugman’s Clinton-defending column was so edgy and threatening that
the New York Times — which published the column — was effectively
suppressing Krugman’s brave stance by refusing to promote it on
Twitter (the NYT tweeted Krugman’s column a few hours later, early in
the afternoon). Thankfully, it appears that Krugman — at least thus
far — has suffered no governmental recriminations or legal threats,
nor any career penalties, for his intrepid, highly risky defense of
Hillary Clinton.
That’s because — in contrast to his actually brave, orthodoxy-defying
work in 2002 as one of the few media voices opposed to the invasion of
Iraq, for which he deserves eternal credit — Krugman here is doing
little more than echoing conventional media wisdom. That prominent
journalists are overwhelmingly opposed to Donald Trump is barely
debatable; their collective contempt for him is essentially out in the
open, which is where it should be. Contrary to Krugman’s purported
expectation, countless Clinton-supporting journalists rushed to
express praise for Krugman. Indeed, with very few exceptions, U.S.
elites across the board — from both parties, spanning multiple
ideologies — are aligned with unprecedented unity against Donald
Trump. The last thing required to denounce him, or to defend Hillary
Clinton, is bravery.
That wasn’t true at first: For a long time, journalists refused to
take the dangers posed by Trump’s campaign seriously. In March 2016, I
wrote a column denouncing the U.S. media for venerating feigned
neutrality over its responsibility to sound the alarm about how
extremist and menacing Trump’s candidacy really is. But in the last
few months, Trump’s media portrayal has been overwhelmingly (and
justifiably) negative; his shady business scams have been endlessly
investigated and dissected (often on the front page of the NYT); he
and his surrogates are subjected to remarkably (and fairly) harsh
interviews; his pathological lying has been unequivocally chronicled
by numerous media outlets; and few journalists have suppressed their
horror at his most extremist policies. As BuzzFeed’s Tom Gara put it last
month:
“My Twitter timeline is now just a continuous rolling denunciation of
Donald Trump.”
That American journalists have dispensed with muted tones and fake
neutrality when reporting on Trump is a positive development. He and
his rhetoric pose genuine threats, and the U.S. media would be
irresponsible if it failed to make that clear. But aggressive
investigative journalism against Trump is not enough for Democratic
partisans whose voice is dominant in U.S. media discourse. They also
want a cessation of any news coverage that reflects negatively on
Hillary Clinton. Most, of course, won’t say this explicitly (though
some do), but — as the wildly adored Krugman column from yesterday
reflects — they will just reflexively dismiss any such coverage as
illegitimate and invalid.
It should be the opposite of surprising, or revealing, that pundits
loyally devoted to a particular candidate dislike all reporting that
reflects negatively on that candidate. There is probably no more
die-hard Clinton loyalist in the U.S. media than Paul Krugman. He has
used his column for years to defend her and attack any of her critics.
Indeed, in 2008, he was the first to observe that — in his words —
“the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of
personality,” comparing the adulation Clinton’s 2008 primary opponent
was receiving to the swooning over George W. Bush’s flight suit. He
spent the 2016 primary maligning Sanders supporters as unstable,
unserious losers (the straight, white, male columnist also regularly
referred to them — including female and LGBT Sanders supporters — as
“bros”). And now he’s assigned himself the role as Arbiter of Proper
Journalism, and — along with virtually all other Clinton-supporting
pundits and journalists — has oh-so-surprisingly ruled that all
journalism that reflects poorly on Hillary Clinton is unsubstantiated,
biased, and deceitful.
The absolute last metric journalists should use for determining what
to cover is the reaction of pundits who, like Krugman and plenty of
others, are singularly devoted to the election of one of the
candidates. Of course Hillary Clinton’s die-hard loyalists in the
media will dislike, and find invalid, any suggestion that she engaged
in any sort of questionable conduct. Their self-assigned role is to
defend her from all criticisms. They view themselves more as campaign
operatives than journalists: Their principal, overriding goal is to
ensure that Clinton wins the election. They will obviously hate
anything — particularly negative reporting about her — that conflicts
with that goal. They will jettison even their core stated beliefs —
such as the view that big-money donations corrupt politicians — in order
to fulfill that goal.
But it would be journalistic malpractice of the highest order if the
billions of dollars received by the Clintons — both personally and
though their various entities — were not rigorously scrutinized and
exposed in detail by reporters. That’s exactly what they ought to be
doing. The fact that quid pro quos cannot be definitively proven does
not remotely negate the urgency of this journalism. That’s because
quid pro quos by their nature elude such proof (can anyone prove that
Republicans steadfastly support Israel and low taxes because of the
millions they get from Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers, or that
the Florida attorney general decided not to prosecute Trump because his
foundation and his daughter donated to her?).
Beyond quid quo pros, the Clintons’ constant, pioneering merger of
massive private wealth and political power and influence is itself
highly problematic. Nobody forced them to take millions of dollars
from the Saudis and Goldman Sachs tycoons and corporations with vested
interests in the State Department; having chosen to do so with great
personal benefit, they are now confronting the consequences in how the
public views such behavior.
That Donald Trump is an uber-nationalist, bigotry-exploiting demagogue
and unstable extremist does not remotely entitle Hillary Clinton to
waltz into the Oval Office free of aggressive journalistic scrutiny.
Nor does Trump’s extremism constitute a defense to anything that she’s
done. It is absolutely true that Trump has at least as many
troublesome financial transactions and entangling relationships as the
Clintons do: These donations to the Florida attorney general are among
the most corrupt-appearing transactions yet documented. Even worse,
Trump has shielded himself from much needed scrutiny by inexcusably
refusing to release his tax returns, while much of the reporting about
the Clintons is possible only because they have released theirs. All of
that is important and should be highlighted.
But none of it suggests that anything other than a bright journalistic
light is appropriate for examining the Clintons’ conduct. Yet there
are prominent pundits and journalists who literally denounce every
critical report about Clinton as unfair and deceitful, and band
together to malign the reporters who scrutinize the Clintons’
financial transactions. Those prominent voices combine with the
million-dollar online army that supreme sleaze merchant David Brock
has assembled to attack Clinton critics; as the Los Angeles Times
reported in May: “Clinton’s well-heeled backers have opened a new
frontier in digital campaigning, one that seems to have been inspired
by some of the internet’s worst instincts. Correct the Record, a Super
PAC coordinating with Clinton’s campaign, is spending some $1 million
to find and confront social media users who post unflattering messages
about the Democratic front-runner.”
All of this means that any journalists reporting negatively on Clinton
are instantly and widely bombarded with criticisms denouncing their
work as illegitimate, as they’ve started noting:
Or just look at the outrage directed last night at New York Times
reporter Maggie Haberman — who has written story after story
investigating Donald Trump — for the crime of innocuously noting a
Washington Post story about Bill Clinton’s multimillion-dollar payday
for a largely no-show job from a for-profit college:
It’s very common for political factions to believe that they’re
persecuted and victimized. Even with the overwhelming bulk of the
national media so openly aligned against Trump — with an endless array
of investigative stories showing Trump to be an unscrupulous con
artist and pathological liar — Clinton supporters seem to genuinely
believe that the media is actually biased against their candidate.
The reality is that large, pro-Clinton liberal media platforms — such
as Vox, and the Huffington Post, and prime-time MSNBC programs, and
the columnists and editorialists of the New York Times and the
Washington Post, and most major New York-based weekly magazines — have
been openly campaigning for Hillary Clinton. I don’t personally see
anything wrong with that — I’m glad when journalists shed their faux
objectivity; I believe the danger of Trump’s candidacy warrants that;
and I hope this candor continues past the November election — but the
everyone-is-against-us self-pity from Clinton partisans is just a
joke. They are the dominant voices in elite media discourse, and it’s a
big reason why Clinton is highly likely to win.
That’s all the more reason why journalists should be subjecting
Clinton’s financial relationships, associations, and secret
communications to as much scrutiny as Donald Trump’s. That certainly
does not mean that journalists should treat their various sins and
transgressions as equivalent: Nothing in the campaign compares to
Trump’s deport-11-million-people or ban-all-Muslim policies, or his
attacks on a judge for his Mexican ethnicity, etc. But this emerging
narrative that Clinton should not only enjoy the support of a
virtually united elite class but also a scrutiny-free march into the
White House is itself quite dangerous. Clinton partisans in the media
— including those who regard themselves as journalists — will continue
to reflexively attack all reporting that reflects negatively on her, but
that reporting should nonetheless continue with unrestrained aggression.
Contact the author:
Glenn Greenwald✉glenn.greenwald@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@ggreenwald
˅ ⎕ 291 Comments
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Photo: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Hold Dueling Rallies — But Trump Gets
Most of the TV Coverage Zaid Jilani
Zaid Jilani
Sep. 6 2016, 7:14 p.m.
Photo: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton held rallies at nearly the same time
on Tuesday, with Trump doing an event in Virginia and Clinton holding
one in Florida.
Trump, in a national-security focused Q&A with former Defense
Intelligence Agency chief Michael Flynn, described the Iran-Iraq war
in flippant terms, saying that the two countries would “fight fight
fight. And then Saddam Hussein would do the gas. And somebody else
would do something else. And they’d rest.”
Clinton, on the other hand, focused her remarks on issues like college
affordability and small businesses.
Fox, CNN, and MSNBC responded by giving almost all of their attention
to Trump.
The networks started carrying Trump’s remarks at around 2:15 p.m. ET.
When Clinton started speaking at around 2:30, the networks relegated
her to a small, muted stream in the lower right-hand corner (MSNBC
briefly put both up side by side as they offered commentary):
“Let’s listen to just a little bit of this, to get the flavor of it,”
Fox anchor Martha MacCallum said when turning to the feed of Trump’s
remarks.
Fox then stayed with Trump for 23 minutes, before switching to Clinton
at
2:41 and carrying her uninterrupted for six minutes.
MSNBC carried Trump even longer, star
≡
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Glenn _Greenwald
f
t
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291
Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The Unrelenting Pundit-Led Effort to Delegitimize All Negative
Reporting About Hillary Clinton /staff/glenn-greenwald/Glenn Greenwald
/staff/glenn-greenwald//staff/glenn-greenwald/
/staff/glenn-greenwald/
Sep. 6 2016, 10:53 a.m.
In his New York Times column yesterday, Paul Krugman did something
that he made clear he regarded as quite brave: He defended the
Democratic Party presidential nominee and likely next U.S. president
from journalistic investigations. Complaining about media bias,
Krugman claimed that journalists are driven by “the presumption that
anything Hillary Clinton does must be corrupt, most spectacularly
illustrated by the increasingly bizarre coverage of the Clinton
Foundation.” While generously acknowledging that it was legitimate to
take a look at the billions of dollars raised by the Clintons as
Hillary pursued increasing levels of political power — vast sums often
received from the very parties most vested in her decisions as a
public official — it is now “very clear,” he proclaimed, that there was
absolutely nothing improper about any of what she or her husband did.
Krugman’s column, chiding the media for its unfairly negative coverage
of his beloved candidate, was, predictably, a big hit among Democrats
— not just because of their agreement with its content but because of
what they regarded as the remarkable courage required to publicly
defend someone as marginalized and besieged as the former first lady,
two-term New York senator, secretary of state, and current
establishment-backed multimillionaire presidential front-runner.
Krugman — in a tweet proclamation that has now been re-tweeted more
than 10,000 times — heralded himself this way: “I was reluctant to
write today’s column because I knew journos would hate it. But it felt
like a moral duty.”
As my colleague Zaid Jilani remarked: “I can imagine Paul Krugman
standing in front of the mirror saying, ‘This is *your Tahrir Square*
big guy.’” Nate Silver, early yesterday morning, even suggested that
Krugman’s Clinton-defending column was so edgy and threatening that
the New York Times — which published the column — was effectively
suppressing Krugman’s brave stance by refusing to promote it on
Twitter (the NYT tweeted Krugman’s column a few hours later, early in
the afternoon). Thankfully, it appears that Krugman — at least thus
far — has suffered no governmental recriminations or legal threats,
nor any career penalties, for his intrepid, highly risky defense of
Hillary Clinton.
That’s because — in contrast to his actually brave, orthodoxy-defying
work in 2002 as one of the few media voices opposed to the invasion of
Iraq, for which he deserves eternal credit — Krugman here is doing
little more than echoing conventional media wisdom. That prominent
journalists are overwhelmingly opposed to Donald Trump is barely
debatable; their collective contempt for him is essentially out in the
open, which is where it should be. Contrary to Krugman’s purported
expectation, countless Clinton-supporting journalists rushed to
express praise for Krugman. Indeed, with very few exceptions, U.S.
elites across the board — from both parties, spanning multiple
ideologies — are aligned with unprecedented unity against Donald
Trump. The last thing required to denounce him, or to defend Hillary
Clinton, is bravery.
That wasn’t true at first: For a long time, journalists refused to
take the dangers posed by Trump’s campaign seriously. In March 2016, I
wrote a column denouncing the U.S. media for venerating feigned
neutrality over its responsibility to sound the alarm about how
extremist and menacing Trump’s candidacy really is. But in the last
few months, Trump’s media portrayal has been overwhelmingly (and
justifiably) negative; his shady business scams have been endlessly
investigated and dissected (often on the front page of the NYT); he
and his surrogates are subjected to remarkably (and fairly) harsh
interviews; his pathological lying has been unequivocally chronicled
by numerous media outlets; and few journalists have suppressed their
horror at his most extremist policies. As BuzzFeed’s Tom Gara put it last
month:
“My Twitter timeline is now just a continuous rolling denunciation of
Donald Trump.”
That American journalists have dispensed with muted tones and fake
neutrality when reporting on Trump is a positive development. He and
his rhetoric pose genuine threats, and the U.S. media would be
irresponsible if it failed to make that clear. But aggressive
investigative journalism against Trump is not enough for Democratic
partisans whose voice is dominant in U.S. media discourse. They also
want a cessation of any news coverage that reflects negatively on
Hillary Clinton. Most, of course, won’t say this explicitly (though
some do), but — as the wildly adored Krugman column from yesterday
reflects — they will just reflexively dismiss any such coverage as
illegitimate and invalid.
It should be the opposite of surprising, or revealing, that pundits
loyally devoted to a particular candidate dislike all reporting that
reflects negatively on that candidate. There is probably no more
die-hard Clinton loyalist in the U.S. media than Paul Krugman. He has
used his column for years to defend her and attack any of her critics.
Indeed, in 2008, he was the first to observe that — in his words —
“the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of
personality,” comparing the adulation Clinton’s 2008 primary opponent
was receiving to the swooning over George W. Bush’s flight suit. He
spent the 2016 primary maligning Sanders supporters as unstable,
unserious losers (the straight, white, male columnist also regularly
referred to them — including female and LGBT Sanders supporters — as
“bros”). And now he’s assigned himself the role as Arbiter of Proper
Journalism, and — along with virtually all other Clinton-supporting
pundits and journalists — has oh-so-surprisingly ruled that all
journalism that reflects poorly on Hillary Clinton is unsubstantiated,
biased, and deceitful.
The absolute last metric journalists should use for determining what
to cover is the reaction of pundits who, like Krugman and plenty of
others, are singularly devoted to the election of one of the
candidates. Of course Hillary Clinton’s die-hard loyalists in the
media will dislike, and find invalid, any suggestion that she engaged
in any sort of questionable conduct. Their self-assigned role is to
defend her from all criticisms. They view themselves more as campaign
operatives than journalists: Their principal, overriding goal is to
ensure that Clinton wins the election. They will obviously hate
anything — particularly negative reporting about her — that conflicts
with that goal. They will jettison even their core stated beliefs —
such as the view that big-money donations corrupt politicians — in order
to fulfill that goal.
But it would be journalistic malpractice of the highest order if the
billions of dollars received by the Clintons — both personally and
though their various entities — were not rigorously scrutinized and
exposed in detail by reporters. That’s exactly what they ought to be
doing. The fact that quid pro quos cannot be definitively proven does
not remotely negate the urgency of this journalism. That’s because
quid pro quos by their nature elude such proof (can anyone prove that
Republicans steadfastly support Israel and low taxes because of the
millions they get from Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers, or that
the Florida attorney general decided not to prosecute Trump because his
foundation and his daughter donated to her?).
Beyond quid quo pros, the Clintons’ constant, pioneering merger of
massive private wealth and political power and influence is itself
highly problematic. Nobody forced them to take millions of dollars
from the Saudis and Goldman Sachs tycoons and corporations with vested
interests in the State Department; having chosen to do so with great
personal benefit, they are now confronting the consequences in how the
public views such behavior.
That Donald Trump is an uber-nationalist, bigotry-exploiting demagogue
and unstable extremist does not remotely entitle Hillary Clinton to
waltz into the Oval Office free of aggressive journalistic scrutiny.
Nor does Trump’s extremism constitute a defense to anything that she’s
done. It is absolutely true that Trump has at least as many
troublesome financial transactions and entangling relationships as the
Clintons do: These donations to the Florida attorney general are among
the most corrupt-appearing transactions yet documented. Even worse,
Trump has shielded himself from much needed scrutiny by inexcusably
refusing to release his tax returns, while much of the reporting about
the Clintons is possible only because they have released theirs. All of
that is important and should be highlighted.
But none of it suggests that anything other than a bright journalistic
light is appropriate for examining the Clintons’ conduct. Yet there
are prominent pundits and journalists who literally denounce every
critical report about Clinton as unfair and deceitful, and band
together to malign the reporters who scrutinize the Clintons’
financial transactions. Those prominent voices combine with the
million-dollar online army that supreme sleaze merchant David Brock
has assembled to attack Clinton critics; as the Los Angeles Times
reported in May: “Clinton’s well-heeled backers have opened a new
frontier in digital campaigning, one that seems to have been inspired
by some of the internet’s worst instincts. Correct the Record, a Super
PAC coordinating with Clinton’s campaign, is spending some $1 million
to find and confront social media users who post unflattering messages
about the Democratic front-runner.”
All of this means that any journalists reporting negatively on Clinton
are instantly and widely bombarded with criticisms denouncing their
work as illegitimate, as they’ve started noting:
Or just look at the outrage directed last night at New York Times
reporter Maggie Haberman — who has written story after story
investigating Donald Trump — for the crime of innocuously noting a
Washington Post story about Bill Clinton’s multimillion-dollar payday
for a largely no-show job from a for-profit college:
It’s very common for political factions to believe that they’re
persecuted and victimized. Even with the overwhelming bulk of the
national media so openly aligned against Trump — with an endless array
of investigative stories showing Trump to be an unscrupulous con
artist and pathological liar — Clinton supporters seem to genuinely
believe that the media is actually biased against their candidate.
The reality is that large, pro-Clinton liberal media platforms — such
as Vox, and the Huffington Post, and prime-time MSNBC programs, and
the columnists and editorialists of the New York Times and the
Washington Post, and most major New York-based weekly magazines — have
been openly campaigning for Hillary Clinton. I don’t personally see
anything wrong with that — I’m glad when journalists shed their faux
objectivity; I believe the danger of Trump’s candidacy warrants that;
and I hope this candor continues past the November election — but the
everyone-is-against-us self-pity from Clinton partisans is just a
joke. They are the dominant voices in elite media discourse, and it’s a
big reason why Clinton is highly likely to win.
That’s all the more reason why journalists should be subjecting
Clinton’s financial relationships, associations, and secret
communications to as much scrutiny as Donald Trump’s. That certainly
does not mean that journalists should treat their various sins and
transgressions as equivalent: Nothing in the campaign compares to
Trump’s deport-11-million-people or ban-all-Muslim policies, or his
attacks on a judge for his Mexican ethnicity, etc. But this emerging
narrative that Clinton should not only enjoy the support of a
virtually united elite class but also a scrutiny-free march into the
White House is itself quite dangerous. Clinton partisans in the media
— including those who regard themselves as journalists — will continue
to reflexively attack all reporting that reflects negatively on her, but
that reporting should nonetheless continue with unrestrained aggression.
