Amy Chozick’s admitted remorse for committing an act of fairly unremarkable journalism during the 2016 election says so much about the current state of the news media.
Chozick, a writer for the New York Times, wrote last Friday about her time covering the Hillary Clinton campaign and her mixed feelings over “the possibility that we’d become puppets in Vladimir Putin’s master plan” when the paper published John Podesta’s emails, which had been hacked and put online by WikiLeaks.
“I didn’t argue that it appeared the emails were stolen by a hostile foreign government that had staged an attack on our electoral system,” she said. “I didn’t push to hold off on publishing them until we could have a less harried discussion. … I chose the byline.”
In so much as Chozick and her colleagues were “puppets” in choosing to write about material that was already available on the Internet, the Times showed a notable lack of interest in what was even in the emails.
The one story Chozick, with the help of two other reporters, wrote of consequence related to the emails was on excerpts of private paid speeches that showed Clinton “at home” with big Wall Street bankers.
The Times never covered an email from Podesta to Clinton dated Aug. 21, 2015 that showed her campaign chairman referring to a group of highly accomplished men as “needy Latinos.” Most people reading this column are probably hearing about it for the first time.
The “needy Latinos” named in the email were former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, former Transportation and Energy Secretary Federico Peña, and former Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, all of whom are Democrats of Latin descent.
In his message to Clinton, Podesta was urging her to call Richardson and Peña in order to woo them into publicly backing her campaign.
That’s a story otherwise made for the front page: A powerful white man dismissing minorities as “needy.” But that particular email was of virtually no interest to the national media.
Neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post covered it, and it was also almost entirely absent from TV news.
When CNN gave it a brief mention, the anchor said the email contained “a couple unflattering terms” but was sure to note that Podesta at least “complimented” Richardson as a “valuable surrogate.”
How nice of Podesta to have acknowledged that this ethnic minority came in handy.
Then-candidate Donald Trump was called a racist and a bigot every single day during the campaign. Do you think Chozick would feel the same remorse about covering a hacked email by his campaign manager Kellyanne Conway wherein the phrase “needy Latinos” came up? Under those circumstances, do you think that phrase would have shown up more than once on CNN or at all in the Washington Post?
Chozick didn’t cover the “needy Latinos” email but she said in her confessional piece last week that she thought the bank transcript was “juicy.”
Here’s from her report about that “juicy” transcript:
There is more juice in a bag of sunflower seeds.
Chozick isn’t the first to regret her coverage of the campaign. CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin said in January that he was “somewhat responsible” for anything he may have said on air that might have given the impression that he believed Clinton wasn’t a chaste nun when compared to Trump.
“I think it led to a sense of false equivalence that was misleading,” he said in a podcast interview, “and I regret my role in doing that.”
Toobin’s sin: He mentioned once or twice on air that there were some seedy dealings at the Clinton Foundation and her private email server may have been a problem.
This is otherwise known as: an acknowledgment of facts and events.
It would be like saying the media should have ignored the Access Hollywood tape because Trump (rightfully) believed he was having a private conversation at the time it was recorded.
No reporter regrets covering that. That’s journalism.
But for Chozick, Toobin, and others, it’s not that they regret doing journalism. It’s that they regret Trump won the election in spite of it.
