How Hillary Clinton's pneumonia flap shows everything wrong with the press in 2016

I you dropped into our presidential campaign last weekend knowing nothing about it, you probably would have been puzzled at why everyone was making such a big deal out of the fact that one of our major party nominees got light-headed one day — the result, we later learned, of pneumonia and probably dehydration, conditions that are easy to treat. What exactly was so momentous about this event, that it should have the news media so worked up? The answer is just about everything that's wrong with the way the 2016 campaign has been covered.

Let's not mince words here: Donald Trump — a bigot and a con man who appeals to the worst instincts of the worst people, who neither knows nor cares how government works, who encourages violence and promises to commit war crimes, who lies so often and so blatantly that it's positively pathological, who has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that he's the most loathsome human being to have been nominated by a major party in living memory — Donald freaking Trump stands a reasonably good chance of being elected president of the United States and thus becoming the most powerful human being on Earth, and news outlets are running pieces on "Hydrated Hillary: 9 times Clinton quenched her thirst."

Let's stipulate that Hillary Clinton should before now have given us more information on her medical history (though she had already given more than Trump). But consider that at around the same time, some people were trying to call more attention to the topic of the Trump Foundation, an extraordinary story of deception, possible illegal contributions, and tax evasion, and morally despicable double-dealing. And yet The Washington Post's David Fahrenthold is almost the only reporter assigned to that story on an ongoing basis. But when Clinton gets faint at a memorial service, news organizations mobilize like it's D-Day, assigning multiple reporters to investigate every aspect of the story. Tuesday's New York Times, for instance, included four separate stories in the news section about this momentous event, two of which were on the front page. The liberal group Media Matters for America reported that on that day, the three cable networks spent a combined 51 minutes and 51 seconds talking about the Trump Foundation, but over 13.5 hours talking about Clinton's fainting and pneumonia.

What was the cause of this journalistic feeding frenzy? The facts seem rather mundane. Clinton had pneumonia, a temporary condition which doesn't bear on her fitness to be president, and hoped it would pass. If it had been a year from now when we found out that she got treated for it during the campaign but it didn't affect her ability to continue, no one would think she had somehow betrayed everyone's trust by not rushing to tell reporters about it. And when she got light-headed, her campaign explained what the likely cause was. All in all, it hardly seems like an Earth-shattering turn of events.

http://theweek.com/articles/648761/how-hillary-clintons-pneumonia-flap-shows-everything-wrong-press-2016