Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Journamalism

If you happen to follow the Lawyers, Guns and Money blog (which I recommend) you know that Scott Lemieux has displayed the graphic at the top of this post about a gazillion times. Now it turns out that Ivanka Trump was using a private e-mail account to conduct government business -- after we already learned that her father uses an unsecured, private cell phone.

It has tended to fade into the dark backward and abysm of time, but as Matthew Yglesias makes incandescently clear here, a dispositive reason why Ivanka's father occupies the office of president is because of the obsession of the corporate media -- driven notably by the New York Times -- with Hillary Clinton's e-mail management practices. Yeah, you can argue all kinds of ways the Clinton campaign could have done better or somebody else would have been a better candidate, but the bottom line is that a few tens of thousands of votes in a few states made the difference, and the effect of the e-mail pseudo-scandal was more than enough to swing them.

As Media Matters confirms, the major news network nearly ignored public policy issues in their coverage of the election. They gave three times as much coverage to Clinton's e-mails as they did to all policy issues combined. It was the e-mails that were the actual ostensible occasion for the Lock Her Up chants. The New York Times had three stories covering the entire front page above the fold about Clinton's e-mails on the day James Comey sent a letter to the House, that he knew would be leaked, saying he had re-opened the investigation on a flimsy pretext -- which of course came to nothing.

The NYT editors, however, think that Ivanka's use of a private e-mail account is inconsequential -- they have a brief story buried deep in the paper, and you can't even find it on the web site. I'm deeply puzzled why they do what they do.

UPDATE: Impersonating other commenters is absolutely not permitted and results in immediate, permanent banning. 

5 comments:

Bob Owen said...


Her attorney claims this issue occurred in the post election transition and before she was a White House employee.

That might be the reason NYT is not that interested. If they thought there was some 'meat' on this story, they'd be on it.

Cervantes said...

I publish the above comment only to debunk it. According to the WaPo story:

"White House ethics officials learned of Trump’s repeated use of personal email when reviewing emails gathered last fall by five Cabinet agencies to respond to a public records lawsuit. That review revealed that throughout much of 2017, she often discussed or relayed official White House business using a private email account with a domain that she shares with her husband, Jared Kushner.

The discovery alarmed some advisers to President Trump, who feared that his daughter’s prac­tices bore similarities to the personal email use of Hillary Clinton, an issue he made a focus of his 2016 campaign. He attacked his Democratic challenger as untrustworthy and dubbed her “Crooked Hillary” for using a personal email account as secretary of state.

Some aides were startled by the volume of Ivanka Trump’s personal emails — and taken aback by her response when questioned about the practice. She said she was not familiar with some details of the rules, according to people with knowledge of her reaction."

Here, there is such a thing as objective reality, and truth. There are no alternative facts.

Mark said...

I also don't understand why the MSM are burying the story. As far as I can tell, there is no rational reason for a truly unbiased media to do it. That leaves irrational reasons, or bias. It's almost enough to drive a person to conspiracy theories.

Don Quixote said...

I believe, as did Daniel Patrick Moynihan, when he famously said, "You're entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts." Tell that to the demented resident of the White House!

Cervantes said...

Well, to be fair, the WaPo broke it and CNN at least is featuring it prominently, along with some fairly outraged commentary. The NYT, however, is especially egregious here.