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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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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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.