In many quarters of the American news media today, seasoned journalists seem incapable of pondering those parts of reality that don’t complement their political worldviews. It goes beyond “bias”—we’re all biased. This is negligence.
Consider the trove of emails between FBI and Department of Justice officials published this week. The emails concern the June 27, 2016, meeting between former president Bill Clinton and then-attorney general Loretta Lynch. As readers may remember, Clinton paid an apparently impromptu visit to the attorney general aboard her DoJ plane while it was parked at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport. It was extremely improper for the two to meet for any reason. Clinton was the husband of the subject of an FBI investigation, and Lynch, as attorney general, had the ultimate authority over that investigation.
The meeting likely wouldn’t have made it into the news at all except for Christopher Sign, an industrious reporter with Phoenix’s ABC affiliate, who pursued the story and made it national news. Lynch eventually conceded that the meeting raised “questions and concerns.” At the time, though, she told Sign that she and the former president only discussed grandchildren, some golf Clinton played in Phoenix, and other such innocuous topics. Sign reported that “the FBI [was] there on the tarmac instructing everybody around ‘no photos, no pictures, no cell phones.’ ” That was strange, and it was strange, too, that no one was able to find any evidence that Clinton had played golf in Phoenix. This encounter and its suggestion of conflict of interest led FBI director James Comey to take the unorthodox step of holding a press conference on July 5, 2016, where he announced that the bureau’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server would not result in a recommendation to the Department of Justice to indict her. Comey later recalled that Attorney General Lynch had directed him not to call the investigation an “investigation” but instead to call it a “matter.” A direction, Comey said, that “confused me and concerned me.”
None of this mess, however, confused or concerned much of the mainstream news media. We don’t relish the tired “imagine if” logic of today’s political discourse—Imagine if he/she were a Democrat/Republican!—but it is utterly beyond dispute that if any Republican attorney general had engaged in a similar meeting with the spouse of a front-running Republican presidential candidate under the cloud of an FBI investigation, journalists in the mainstream media would have needed no extra motivation to cover the story. Yet for a full year now, only right-leaning media outlets—Fox News, Breitbart, and such—have shown a serious interest in the Clinton-Lynch meeting.
That brings us to this week, when the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) published more than 400 pages of emails received from the Department of Justice in response to a Freedom of Information Act inquiry. The documents are newsworthy, whatever the arbiters of news may think.
The first thing to be said about this trove is that for a year the FBI pretended it didn’t exist. The ACLJ’s initial open-records request came up with nothing: “No records responsive to your request were located,” the bureau said in a letter. But the same request to DoJ was answered with scores of emails, many of them to and from FBI officials. Why the initial stonewall from the FBI?
The emails are heavily redacted and don’t reveal much about what Clinton and Lynch discussed, why the former president put the attorney general in such a compromising position, or why she allowed herself to be put there. What they reveal is an agency trying hard to control the damage. DoJ’s communications director Melanie Newman asks her FBI counterparts to “let me know if you get any questions” about this “casual, unscheduled meeting between former president Bill Clinton and the AG.” She also offers talking points in the event media asked about the meeting, but these are inexplicably redacted. Another email reveals a DoJ spokesman, Patrick Rodenbush, informing his colleagues that the FBI was “looking for guidance” about inquiries that the FBI had prevented media from taking pictures of the Clinton-Lynch meeting, as Sign was saying in his reports.
It’s all very murky. But so is virtually every political scandal when the press begins to ask questions. The trouble with this one is that journalists in the mainstream media never bothered to start asking questions. Some of the reporters quoted or referenced in the emails the ACLJ received are essentially volunteering to be spun into inactivity. New York Times reporter Mark Landler, for instance, worded his request to DoJ for comment by noting that “I’ve been pressed into service to write about the questions being raised” by the Phoenix meeting. Another reporter, Matt Zapotosky of the Washington Post, said that although his editors were “still pretty interested in [the story],” he himself was hoping that the DoJ press folks “put it to rest by answering just a few more questions.” In another exchange, Melanie Newman noted that she “talked to [an] ABC producer, who noted that they aren’t interested, even if FOX runs with it.”
Compare this sort of complaisance—and the silence with which mainstream media outlets greeted the ACLJ documents this week—to journalists’ tireless and aggressive efforts to get their hands on any document pointing to any connection between any Russian official and any individual with any connection to the Trump presidential campaign. Much of the Trump-Russia coverage has hit the mark, and we’ve referenced the best of it in these pages. If only we could reference their tireless work in the other direction.
The inconsistency is extraordinary—and regrettable. That reporters, editors, and producers working for the nation’s most prestigious news outlets found this story largely uninteresting suggests just how imperceptive they are of their own ideological motivations. Their blindness in this regard is a major reason why Donald Trump’s strident attacks on the media sound entirely fair to a great many Americans. By avoiding the story of this scandalous conference on the tarmac in Phoenix—part of a general habit of minimizing the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails and illegal use of a private server—many of these journalists made Trump’s most vituperative charges sound like the plain truth.
Most journalists in America’s mainstream are capable and hardworking. We know lots of them and generally like them. But hackery has consequences.
