The vast right-wing conspiracy is still real. Also, the media is really stupid

Let me start by admitting, upfront, how truly fucking boring I find the Hillary Clinton e-mail story. Not only is it unclear whether the former Secretary of State and future presidential candidate did anything illegal, but the fact that she’s willing to turn her emails over to the State Department casts doubt on the Republican fever dream that her now-infamous private in-box will contain mash notes from foreign donors to her husband’s foundation, or explicit instructions to her underlings to shred vital documents related to the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya.

It’s not a non-story, exactly. It’s more like a fishing expedition, a la Whitewater and Travelgate and the Clinton Christmas card list.

The primary motive of such stories isn’t really to root out genuine instances of moral turpitude. It’s to retail a narrative of insinuation that sells newspapers and baits clicks, one that the press has been working for three decades solid when it comes to the Clintons.

Emailgate (as it will surely be dubbed) is a story that arises from confirmation bias—without the confirmation of wrongdoing. Because the media have portrayed the Clintons as slippery and secretive for so many years—masters of the massive cover-up!—we should all assume that Hillary doing business on her private email is slippery and secretive and evidence of some massive cover-up.

But if you look at the history of the Clinton scandals, none of them, other than the Lewinsky nonsense, ever amounted to a hill of beans. All they did was prove to American news consumers (and to Hillary in particular) that the media really were engaged in a “vast, right-wing conspiracy” to take her family down.


http://www.salon.com/2015/03/09/the_vast_right_wing_conspiracy_is_still_real_also_the_media_is_really_stupid/