Playing into the right’s trap: The media is all too quick to go chasing phony Clinton scandals

by Gary LeGum at Salon

http://www.salon.com/2016/08/24/playing-into-the-rights-trap-the-media-is-all-too-quick-to-go-chasing-phony-clinton-scandals/

"SNIP.............


Stop me if you heard this story recently: The conservative legal group Judicial Watch releases a batch of State Department emails it obtained through lawsuits and FOIA requests, all related to the work of the Clinton Foundation. This results in a round of headlines proclaiming that Foundation donors tried to leverage their giving into access to Hillary Clinton while she was serving as Secretary of State. Political reporters write stories full of innuendo up front, waiting until around the tenth paragraph to reveal that those donors actually failed in their quests to trade donations for special meetings or other privileges with Clinton. Other writers look at the original stories and knock them down, and then we all go back to tweeting about the Kardashians or something.

Sound familiar? It should, because it happened two weeks ago, on Aug. 10, when Judicial Watch released 296 pages of emails, mostly from Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s email account, which showed a whole lot of maneuvering for meetings and favors and nothing in the way of results. If anything, Abedin looks to have been good at her of job of keeping thirsty rent-seekers away from her boss. The email release grabbed some attention for a news cycle or two, and then sank like a rock tossed into the ocean.

This past Monday, Judicial Watch released another 725 pages of emails, again mostly from Abedin’s account, and again seeming to show a lot of people asking for meetings or favors and getting a lot of nothing instead. The whole mishegas so far seems to be a replay of the big pile of zilch from two weeks ago.

This has not stopped much of the political media from acting, collectively, like a goldfish with a head injury. “Emails reveal how foundation donors got access to Clinton and her close aides at State Department” the Washington Post gravely intoned in its headline. The New York Times splashed its story on the front page, with exactly zero recognition that, with respect to email releases from Judicial Watch, it is the exact same story from two weeks ago. With respect to the overall emails dug up by the FBI and the State Department during their investigations of Clinton’s private email server, there is a good chance some in this latest batch are duplicates that have already been released.


...............SNIP"