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posted by n1 on Tuesday September 06 2016, @11:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the she's-overcome-so-much dept.

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Paul Krugman did something that he made clear he regarded as quite brave: He defended the Democratic Party presidential nominee and likely next U.S. president from journalistic investigations. Complaining about media bias, Krugman claimed that journalists are driven by “the presumption that anything Hillary Clinton does must be corrupt, most spectacularly illustrated by the increasingly bizarre coverage of the Clinton Foundation.” While generously acknowledging that it was legitimate to take a look at the billions of dollars raised by the Clintons as she pursued increasing levels of political power — vast sums often received from the very parties most vested in her decisions as a public official — it is now “very clear,” he proclaimed, that there was absolutely nothing improper about any of what she or her husband did.

Krugman’s column, chiding the media for its unfairly negative coverage of his beloved candidate, was, predictably, a big hit among Democrats — not just because of their agreement with its content but because of what they regarded as the remarkable courage required to publicly defend someone as marginalized and besieged as the former First Lady, two-term New York Senator, Secretary of State, and current establishment-backed multi-millionaire presidential front-runner. Krugman — in a tweet-proclamation that has now been re-tweeted more than 10,000 times — heralded himself this way: “I was reluctant to write today’s column because I knew journos would hate it. But it felt like a moral duty.”

[...] The reality is that large, pro-Clinton liberal media platforms — such as Vox, and The Huffington Post, and prime-time MSNBC programs, and the columnists and editorialists of The New York Times and The Washington Post, and most major New-York-based weekly magazines — have been openly campaigning for Hillary Clinton. I don’t personally see anything wrong with that — I’m glad when journalists shed their faux-objectivity; I believe the danger of Trump’s candidacy warrants that; and I hope this candor continues past the November election — but the everyone-is-against-us self-pity from Clinton partisans is just a joke. They are the dominant voices in elite media discourse, and it’s a big reason why Clinton is highly likely to win.

That’s all the more reason why journalists should be subjecting Clinton’s financial relationships, associations, and secret communications to as much scrutiny as Donald Trump’s. That certainly does not mean that journalists should treat their various sins and transgressions as equivalent: nothing in the campaign compares to Trump’s deport-11-million-people or ban-all-Muslim policies, or his attacks on a judge for his Mexican ethnicity, etc. But this emerging narrative that Clinton should not only enjoy the support of a virtually united elite class but also a scrutiny-free march into the White House is itself quite dangerous. Clinton partisans in the media — including those who regard themselves as journalists — will continue to reflexively attack all reporting that reflects negatively on her, but that reporting should nonetheless continue with unrestrained aggression.

Source: The Intercept


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 07 2016, @01:52PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 07 2016, @01:52PM (#398689) Journal

    “I never received nor sent any material that was marked classified.”

    Notice she didn't say that she never received nor sent any material that was classified. Markings don't make such material classified, but she choose to imply that. And let us note that while she can legally order the striping of security classifications off of State Department documents and propagate them via a promiscuous and poorly protected email server in an "extremely careless" (and of course, feloniously, grossly negligent) way, she can't do the same legally for documents that don't come from the State Department such as spy satellite photos or discussion of undercover sources and agents.

    And that brings up another point here. There are more sorts of classified markings than the portion markings you speak about above. And some of the top secret stuff apparently would be loaded with classified markings. Your "three documents" are merely some unclassified leftovers. Nothing was said of the markings of classified stuff that is not publicly available. But the FBI is curiously disinterested in such illegal activity where either classification markings were stripped from documents which Clinton and her staff had no authority to do so, or they weren't and the illegal handling of classified documents may have been even more brazen than claimed by Clinton.