Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush are making big headlines, but for all the wrong reasons.
For Clinton, news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating her use of an unauthorized private email account when she served as secretary of state has captivated newsrooms since the Washington Post first broke the story Tuesday evening.
“The FBI has begun looking into the security of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private e-mail setup, contacting in the past week a Denver-based technology firm that helped manage the unusual system,” the Post reported. “Also last week, the FBI contacted Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, with questions about the security of a thumb drive in his possession that contains copies of work e-mails Clinton sent during her time as secretary of state.”
For Bush, a sloppily worded comment Tuesday afternoon about taxpayer-funded “women’s health” initiatives has him backtracking and clarifying his actual meaning, but not before reporters and commentators had already sunk their teeth into his gaffe.
The 2016 Republican presidential candidate’s remarks came during an address at a Southern Baptist Convention event in Nashville, Tenn., Tuesday evening. Referring specifically to efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, which has been caught in a scandal involving harvested fetal organs, Bush tried to push back on claims that depriving the nation’s largest provider of abortions of taxpayer dollars would somehow take away from women’s health issues.
“The next president should defund Planned Parenthood. I have the benefit of having been governor and we did defund Planned Parenthood when I was governor. We tried to create a culture of life across the board. The argument against this is, well, women’s health issues are going to be — you’re attacking — it’s a war on women and you’re attacking women’s health issues,” he said.
“You could take dollar for dollar — although I’m not sure we need half a billion dollars for women’s health issues — but if you took dollar for dollar, there are many extraordinarily fine organizations, community health organizations, that exist, federally sponsored community health organizations, to provide quality care for women on a wide variety of health issues,” he added (emphasis added). “But abortion should not be funded by the government, any government, in my mind.”
Bush’s team responded quickly to pushback on his unscripted remarks, saying in a statement on his website that he “misspoke.”
Too late.
Of the most-circulated newspapers in the United States, including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and USA Today, only the Post mentioned Clinton’s FBI woes on its front page Wednesday morning.
Neither the Post, nor the Times, nor USA Today, nor the Wall Street Journal gave Bush’s “women’s heath” remarks front page ink.
However, this doesn’t mean that Clinton and Bush have gone unnoticed by national media.
By Wednesday evening, Bush’s gaffe and Clinton’s FBI woes merited nearly equal airtime from network and cable television, according to data compiled by TV Eyes.
On CNN, Chris Cuomo remarked that if federal investigators are taking a keen interest in your email sever, “it ain’t good.”
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough quipped that same morning, “I feel very comfortable in saying the more you find out about this story, the uglier it gets.”
Then there was online reporting, where Clinton and Bush news flooded news websites on both the left and the right side of the aisle.
“FBI investigating security of Hillary Clinton’s private email server,” read a headline from foxnews.com.
CNN added on its website, “FBI looking into Hillary Clinton’s email server security, lawyer says.”
For CBS News, “FBI investigating security of Hillary Clinton’s emails.”
There was also ample coverage for Bush’s hastily retracted statement.
“Jeb Bush makes gaffe on women’s health funding, quickly walks it back,” Vox blared.
One MSNBC producer wrote, “Incoherence on women’s health trips up Jeb Bush.”
A Washington Post op-ed promised Wednesday to explain what “Jeb Bush’s ‘gaffe’ on women’s health really tells us.”
The Los Angeles Times tracked the story closely, publishing an article titled “Bush says he misspoke about funding for women’s healthcare.”
New York magazine’s Daily Intelligencer asked if Jeb Bush is the new Mitt Romney, drawing clear comparisons between the former Florida governor and the gaffe-prone 2012 Republican presidential candidate.
Clinton’s campaign has, for its part, responded to the Post’s report on her email server and the FBI by stating that, “she did not send nor receive any emails that were marked classified at the time. We want to ensure that appropriate procedures are followed as these emails are reviewed while not unduly delaying the release of her emails.”
“We want that to happen as quickly and as transparently as possible,” he team added.
Clinton has also taken advantage of Bush’s off-the-cuff remarks by openly criticizing the former Florida governor, saying on Twitter, “You are absolutely, unequivocally wrong.”
