Hillary Clinton thinks you all need to stop doubting Hillary Clinton. Don’t question her health. Don’t ask what was in the 30,000 emails she deleted. Don’t follow the money trails that lead in and out of the Clinton Foundation, the State Department, and her own bank account.
This is what we expect from a politician with a paranoid streak. The odd thing is that parts of the media are going along with her.
Much of our news media has diligently, consistently, and expertly scrutinized both Clinton and Donald Trump. This isn’t an easy task, because of Clinton’s Nixon-level secrecy and opacity, and because of Trump’s mind-bending inconsistency and incoherence.
But Clinton’s team has tirelessly worked the refs this election: “You’re making stories out of innocent emails! You’re ignoring Trump’s flaws! All this false equivalence! This is just a question of email server management!”
But this campaign to harass journalists who do their jobs hasn’t been tethered to truth. The New York Times reported in July 2015 that the FBI was investigating Clinton’s emails. Clinton’s media machine immediately blasted this report, calling it a “bogus” and “fictitious.” Of course, the Times was right, and the Clinton campaign knew it at the time, but this is how you work the refs.
Last week, Clinton press secretary Nick Merrill mocked an NBC reporter (“Get a life,” he tweeted) who wrote about Clinton’s cough. Which turned out to be pneumonia.
Less than 48 hours before Clinton went limp, nearly collapsing thanks to that pneumonia, the Washington Post’s Chris Cilizza wrote “Can We Just Stop Talking About Hillary Clinton’s Health Now?”
“[T]o believe that something is seriously wrong with Clinton,” Cilizza wrote, “you have to a) assume her doctor lied and b) that her coughing, which often happens when someone catches a cold or spends a lot of time speaking publicly, is a symptom of her deeper, hidden illness.”
Cilizza concluded, “That seems, um, unlikely to me?”
Of course, she had a “deeper, hidden illness” called pneumonia. But Cilizza wasn’t simply arguing that she was in good health, he was scolding us to stop asking the question.
At least the collapse changed his mind. Some liberal journalists are far worse. You expect center-left journalists to favor Hillary Clinton, because they’re center-left. But because they’re journalists you also may expect them to demand and apply some modicum of scrutiny to the front-runner, who is potentially months away from being the leader of the free world.
But some journalists have decided that scrutiny of Clinton has gone way too far.
Trump pollster Kellyanne Conway in August marked on Twitter the 267th day since Hillary Clinton’s last press conference, and asked for press outrage. CNN media reporter Brian Stelter noted that he any many other reporters are outraged. Matt Yglesias, founding blogger at the liberal site Vox.com, wrote “I find the outrage over this baffling.”
Why? Yglesias is “Against Transparency,” as he had put it in a lengthy essay a week later. Ygelsias inveighed against the Freedom of Information Act’s requirements that policymakers preserve emails, because “if journalists or ideologically motivated activists want to get their hands on them, they can.” It makes no sense, Yglesias argued, that Clinton should have been required to preserve the emails in which she hashed out State Department policy and actions.
If you’ve ever used the Freedom of Information Act, you know that it’s full of exemptions, and that agencies abuse those exemptions blatantly. But the hole-filled FOIA as it stands today is too transparent for Yglesias.
The Washington Post’s editors agreed. The next day they chided Matt Lauer for asking Clinton too many questions about her email server. To review, Clinton (1) set up her own email server; (2) conducted her official business from this account (including the sloppy handling of classified information); (3) kept the server secret from the legal authorities that own her work product; (4) failed to turn over the emails when she left office; (5) repeatedly misled the public about the emails; (6) deleted tens of thousands of them without letting the authorities see them; (7) falsely promised that none of them were work-related; and (8) all along chided the press that questioned her or said there was an investigation going on, even though there was.
The email story has proven that Clinton hates transparency, is willing to break public-records laws, consistently misleads the media and the public, and is sloppy with confidential information. It also suggests she’s hiding something that she finds more damaging to her reputation than her flouting of the law has been.
And thanks to her constantly shifting stories about what is still concealed, we don’t know half the story. Yet the Washington Post — the paper that broke the Watergate scandal — wants reporters to back off the story.
The media’s job is to hold the powerful to account. Many in the media today have concluded that Donald Trump would be a terrifying president, far beyond any threat the U.S. has faced recently. But that doesn’t excuse them from scrutinizing Clinton.
Both Trump and Clinton would be terrible presidents. Presidential power always needs to be restrained, and that restraint will be most important under our next president. Accountability, skepticism, and scrutiny have never been more important than they are this election, and will be over the next four years.
Our media needs to live up to that duty.
Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
