Certainly, there are people who oppose Hillary Clinton for irrational
reasons. However, there are also very rational reasons for opposing her. The
fact that presidential candidates hobnob with big donors doesn't eliminate
the rightness of the criticism. The fact that huge amounts of money were
donated to the Clinton Foundation by representatives of countries with whom
the state department was doing our country's business is not irrelevant. The
Democratic party leadership and the liberal elites that support it will
exonerate obama for things for which Bush was excoriated, and they will
overlook the potential improprieties of Clinton's acts in the state
department as well as the way in which her campaign has been handled while
continuing to emphasize the improprieties of the Bush campaigns and his
administration. They will go on and on about Bush's lies about Iraq while
overlooking Democratic administrations' war crimes, and now we have Bernie
Sanders campaigning for Hillary, talking about how she is committed to the
changes that he was introducing to the public while campaigning against
Hillary and the status quo. And we are supposed to swallow all of this
nonsense because of who Hillary's opponent is.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of S. Kashdan
Sent: Wednesday, September 07, 2016 11:47 AM
To: Blind Democracy List
Subject: [blind-democracy] Years of Media Smears Have Created a Fictional
Version of Hillary Clinton That Millions Have Bought Into
Years of Media Smears Have Created a Fictional Version of Hillary Clinton
That Millions Have Bought Into
By Heather Digby Parton [1]
Salon [2], September 6, 2016
http://www.alternet.org/print/election-2016/media-lies-about-hillary-clinton
This election is about voters choosing the least worst candidate. That's
where we are in our politics.
-- Chris Cillizza (@TheFix) September 4, 2016 [3]
That tweet from Chris Cilizza of The Washington Post's The Fix blog is
cleverly framed to be about the voters' view of this campaign. Both
candidates do have high unfavorable ratings among the public (as does the
Congress and pretty much every other institution, including the press.) That
jaded comment by a member of the media, however, illustrates something
important. Some members of the press are not just commenting on a reality;
they are pushing the theme of two equally unpalatable candidates and it just
isn't true.
The main problem for Clinton is that people think she is a congenital liar.
When asked what it is she lied about, most people can't point to anything
specific; they just know she's dishonest and corrupt. The fact that she's
been dogged by political enemies and investigated by special prosecutors,
the media and Congress with unlimited budgets and every possible means of
getting to the truth and has been exonerated doesn't seem to register.
Indeed, the fact-checkers all find her to be more honest [4] than virtually
anyone in politics [5] while Donald Trump, by contrast, lies more than he
tells the truth. [6]
To understand how this came to be, go back to a column from 1996 in The New
York Times by vicious right-wing columnist William Safire [7] who first
dubbed her a "congenital liar. [8]" All the crimes that he accused her of
committing and lies he insisted that she had told later proved him to be the
liar (or badly misinformed), but it didn't matter. For many reasons, not the
least of which was simple sexism, it was set in stone that this feminist,
lawyer first lady was devious, calculating and power mad--Madame Defarge and
Evita rolled into one. The political press has filtered its coverage of her
through that lens ever since.
As Amanda Marcotte has documented [9], the current "lock her up!" fever,
that burning desire to see her her humiliated and imprisoned (or in some
cases executed for treason [10]) goes back to the 1990s as well. And it's no
less disturbing now than it was then. It's fed by the press' insatiable
appetite for juicy tidbits doled out piece by piece by right-wing
operatives, each story building on itself to create a narrative of crisis
and criminality despite there being no evidence of it being true.
The assumption behind the "Clinton Foundation scandal" is that the mere
possibility of "impropriety" is a form of corruption despite there being
absolutely no proof that any favoritism or transaction actually took place.
(The fact that all politicians in Washington from President Barack Obama to
lowly congresspeople have contacts every day with people who give them money
for their campaigns directly doesn't put any of that in perspective for some
reason.) She alone is being held liable for the big money problem that
infects our system from top to bottom.
Recently, there has been some pushback coming from several journalistic
quarters, which is new. The erroneous AP report that Clinton had pretty much
given exclusive access to Clinton Foundation donors was ably dispatched by
Matthew Yglesias of Vox [11]. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has
challenged [12] several stories, including the breathless "expose" [13]
about a Clinton associate asking for diplomatic passports to rescue two
journalists in North Korea. James Fallows in The Atlantic [14] revisited his
book from 20 years ago called "Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine
American Democracy" and lamented how current coverage shows little
improvement since then.
Paul Waldman in The Washington Post took on [15] the two competing
"foundation" scandals, Trump's being an actual case of flat-out bribery and
Clinton's being nothing. And The New York Times' Paul Krugman devoted a
column [16] to a scathing critique of the press, comparing its coverage to
the treatment of Al Gore in 2000, when a fake "liar" meme circulated,
propagated by right-wing opposition organizations to tar him as dishonest
and mentally unstable [17]. We all know how well that turned out.
I had to laugh at Sunday's silly New York Times story about Hillary Clinton
hobnobbing with wealthy donors [18] as if that were a shocking display of
arrogant elitism. Compare and contrast that with this story from 2012 about
President Obama hobnobbing with wealthy donors [19] portrayed as an
unpleasant but necessary duty in a time of big money dominance. One cannot
escape the fact that Clinton is being held to a different standard.
Much of the criticism in general is focused on The New York Times which
seems to have a strange institutional vendetta against both Clintons. It's
hard to understand why this would be true over so many years but perhaps
Jonathan Allen explained it best in this brutally honest piece called
"Confessions of a Clinton reporter: The media's 5 unspoken rules for
covering Hillary." [20] This, I think, can fairly be said to apply across
the board not just to the Times:
The Clinton rules are driven by reporters' and editors' desire to score the
ultimate prize in contemporary journalism: the scoop that brings down
Hillary Clinton and her family's political empire. At least in that way,
Republicans and the media have a common interest.
This problem has deep roots in our political culture and it's potentially
creating a serious crisis in 2016. If Donald Trump were to pull out a win,
the ramifications would be extreme. And he could. Nate Silver and the 538
gang of statisticians don't give him good odds but they do not believe it's
impossible: [21]
[Our model] shows Trump as having gained about 2 points over two weeks. If
Trump keeps gaining 1 percentage point a week, he'll beat Clinton by a
couple of percentage points on Nov. 8. Hence, Clinton should probably not be
picking out the White House drapes just yet.
People who are sanguine about Trump's losing needs to rethink their
position. And members of the press need to do a serious gut check about how
they're conducting their campaign coverage. As Paul Krugman wrote in his
Monday column, "America and the world can't afford another election tipped
by innuendo."
Heather Digby Parton, also known as "Digby [22]," is a contributing writer
to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and
Analysis Journalism.
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mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Years of Media Smears Have ;
Created a Fictional Version of Hillary Clinton That Millions Have Bought
Into [23]
[24]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/media-lies-about-hillary-clinton
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/heather-digby-parton
[2] http://www.salon.com
[3] https://twitter.com/TheFix/status/772460105774292992
[4]
http://m.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/08/hillary-clinton-one-americas-mos
t-honest-politicians
[5]
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/opinion/campaign-stops/all-politicians-lie
-some-lie-more-than-others.html
[6]
http://www.salon.com/2016/05/15/donald_trump_is_a_serial_liar_more_upsetting
_is_that_no_one_seems_to_care_partner/
[7] http://www.salon.com/2004/11/22/safire_7/
[8] http://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/08/opinion/essay-blizzard-of-lies.html
[9]
http://www.salon.com/2016/08/29/the-clinton-bs-files-lock-her-up-isnt-really
-about-emails-the-rights-been-accusing-the-clintons-of-murder-for-decades/
[10]
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/al-baldasaro-clinton-should-be-execute
d-not-assassinated
[11] http://www.vox.com/2016/8/24/12618446/ap-clinton-foundation-meeting
[12] http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/about-as-clear-cut-as-they-get
[13] http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/you-failed-chumps
[14]
http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/09/trump-time-capsule-92-how-the-media
-undermine-american-democracy/498461/
[15]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/09/05/trumps-history-
of-corruption-is-mind-boggling-so-why-is-clinton-supposedly-the-corrupt-one/
?utm_term=.54e7b65f5aaf
[16]
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/05/opinion/hillary-clinton-gets-gored.html
[17]
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/06/playing-dirty/302960/
[18]
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/us/politics/hillary-clinton-fundraising
.html
[19]
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/06/obama-is-spending-an-unp
recedented-amount-of-time-fundraising-scandal/258526/
[20] http://www.vox.com/2015/7/6/8900143/hillary-clinton-reporting-rules
[21]
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-its-too-soon-for-clinton
-to-run-out-the-clock/
[22] http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/
[23] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Years of Media Smears ;
Have Created a Fictional Version of Hillary Clinton That Millions Have
Bought Into
[24] http://www.alternet.org/
[25] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
