The New York Times versus Hillary Clinton, Rachel Maddow Says They Have a Problem, a Big One
Sometimes it takes a lesbian to speak the truth about misogyny and how damaging it is to women–all women, even those in power.
That’s what Rachel Maddow did July 28 on “The Rachel Maddow Show,” her MSNBC politics hour.
Speak that truth.
And was it ever damning.
Maddow, who has a well-deserved reputation for skewering liars in the political arena, took on the New York Times and what is being called its “Hillary Clinton Problem.”
The New York Times has long been considered America’s–if not the world’s–newspaper of record. It’s where we turn for the tough investigative journalism many other newspapers avoid as both too labor-intensive and too fraught for advertisers.
I read it every morning, as do most political analysts. I check the New York Times Twitter account every night, late, to see what new scoop there might be.
That was where I saw last week’s article that seemed to threaten the front-runner in the Democratic Party’s race for the 2016 presidency.
It was with trepidation that I and many other loyal readers of the New York Times read a story that broke on the NYT Twitter account near midnight on July 23. The headline read: “Criminal Inquiry Sought in Hillary Clinton’s Use of Email.”
It sounded like Hillary Clinton was about to be arrested, or at the very least, subpoenas were being served.
But within a few hours something happened that I can’t remember seeing in all my years as a reporter: The New York Times changed the headline, excising Clinton’s name. They also changed the lede–the opening of the story.
But that was just the beginning of the New York Times walking their story back. On July 27 the NYT Public Editor, Margaret Sullivan, wrote a column attempting to explain what was really not explainable: Why the “newspaper of record” went with a story that wasn’t true.
Not even a little true.
In fact, a story that was not a story at all, but a series of lies strung together–all sourced anonymously.
Sullivan’s column, titled “A Clinton Story Fraught With Inaccuracies: How It Happened and What Next?” read like a Journalism 101 text of what not to do. The bottom line, according to Sullivan: sources lied, or misspoke, or something, and the New York Times reporters and their editor rushed the story into print when they should have waited.
Because they were more interested in a new Clinton-bashing scoop than in presenting the truth.
There was no explanation of why every other news organization in the country was reporting on the New York Times story before Sullivan wrote her column.
There was also no explanation why, for example, the political blog, Talking Points Memo, reported several hours after the initial story under this headline: “DOJ: No, We Weren’t Asked To Launch A Criminal Probe Into Clinton’s Emails.” Or why Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD.), a ranking member of the Congressional Oversight Committee rebutted the New York Times reportage hours after the initial story. Or that the State Department told several different Washington reporters there was no investigation
Yet it took three more days for Sullivan’s column to appear.
Why?
Then there was yet another retraction from the New York Times in an Editor’s Note titled: “Clinton Email Coverage.”
As Maddow laid out the series of events at the New York Times with her characteristic bemused snark rising slowly to outrage, she highlighted each successive error. Her explanation– she does have a PhD in political science, after all–interpolated between each progressively more egregious revelation was stunning: It was impossible not to see what we already knew: The New York Times has a Hillary Clinton Problem.
What Maddow did not note is that this is not the first time the Public Editor has had to walk back a story about Hillary Clinton. This was the third time in as many months that readers had called the New York Times to task over misleading articles on Clinton.
A Google search highlights the problem. Simply inputting both Sullivan’s name and Clinton’s results in a series of links. All with different dates and headlines. All walking back stories.
Only a week before this latest story, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, a renowned anti-feminist who spent the entirety of the 2008 primary focusing on important issues like Hillary Clinton’s breasts and ankles, had written about Hillary as “Clintonian”–whatever that means–and scandal-ridden. But Dowd is a columnist, so she can say whatever she wants. It doesn’t have to be true.
And it’s not. As Maddow explained so clearly, there is no scandal. In fact, there are no scandals at all with regard to Hillary Clinton.
None.
She had a stellar run as the two-term junior senator from New York before she was chosen by President Obama to be his Secretary of State. She also excelled in that role. Stalwart in the Senate (introducing twice as many bills as her competition, Bernie Sanders, despite only being in Congress for eight years to his 26), stalwart in the State Department.
She went from being Obama’s progressive opposition in the 2008 primary to being his close friend and confidant in his Cabinet.
Maddow gave her own explanation for the disconnect between Clinton’s actual record as a politician and the New York Times’ revisionism.
Referring to this most recent story about scandal that was not a scandal, Maddow said, “So this was just a big, high-profile disaster for the New York Times. It was also a reminder of the utterly bizarre relationship that the national media has with Hillary Clinton specifically.”
Maddow called out what no one has mentioned since Saturday Night Live did a skit during the 2008 presidential primary about how no matter what Hillary Clinton did, the media misrepresented it or simply didn’t report it.
In 2008, one of the most shocking moments still resonates: When Clinton swept California in the primary and Obama won Montana the same night, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, who is now news director at the network, focused on Obama, not Clinton. Even though California is the most populous state in the nation, the focus was on Obama’s having won one of the least populous states.
It’s déjà vu all over again.
What Maddow said validated what many of us watching from the political sidelines have thought: The media has a woman problem and that woman is Hillary Clinton, the second most powerful woman in the world and poised to become the most powerful woman on the planet and the first woman president of the United States.
Maddow asserted, “Basically in the national media, everything Hillary Clinton does is a scandal. Right. Remember when she was ‘super guilty’ in Whitewater? Hillary Clinton is covered as if she is a convicted felon, who has to prove her innocence.
And even then she’s still guilty, she just got away with it. That’s basically the attitude of the whole national press for this whole phase of her whole national political career. Talk about the liberal press? Maybe they’re liberal, but they’re certainly not democratic.”
Wow.
Case in point:
When Hillary Clinton gave her opening speech on Roosevelt Island in New York–a speech where people from every conceivable demographic were in attendance from immigrant DREAMers for Hillary to gay dads for Hillary to students to Brooklyn moms, all for Hillary–the New York Times ignored it.
The crowd was estimated by the New York police department at over 50,000. But the New York Times chose not to cover it. They did, however, cover an event for Clinton’s rival, Bernie Sanders, held in a room filled with about two dozen white people.
Individually it appears to be a mistake here, a slip up there–if that were the way news was covered, but it isn’t. As Maddow delineated it–and as the Google search for when the NYT Public Editor has had to explain, retract or defend a story the NYT has published about Hillary Clinton affirms–it’s a pattern.
Maddow reminds her audience that every one of the apologies for the Hillary Clinton email story–which is still being promoted as true on social media–blames anonymous sources. In her column, Sullivan doesn’t take the executive editor, Dean Baquet, the top-ranking editor for the story, Matt Purdy or the two reporters, Matt Apuzzo and Michael S. Schmidt to task.
She doesn’t blame any of them. Sullivan instead blames the “anonymous sources” that allegedly told the reporters that there was a criminal investigation. Repeatedly.
Who are these anonymous sources? And why aren’t we, the readers the New York Times is pledged to serve and inform, privy to who they are? Are they actually just Republicans with an axe to grind against President Obama and Clinton?
It would seem so.
Maddow asserts, “It is the job of a news organization to vet the accuracy and the authenticity of their sources. And you [the NYT] are to blame for the fake stuff that your sources get you to print.”
This is not the first time the New York Times has blamed anonymous sources in an Administration for their errors in reporting. During the lead-in to the Iraq War–the longest war in American history–that was the excuse the New York Times gave for their reporting by Judith Miller, who basically operated as a shill for the Bush Administration, reporting several years of stories that were dead wrong. Stories which meant Americans were killed and maimed in a war based on non-existent weapons of mass destruction.
So when Maddow says about the current series of false stories written about Hillary Clinton for America’s foremost newspaper, “And no, this is not a matter of war and peace like it was last time around with the New York Times and Judith Miller, this is just the matter of who may be the next president of the United States. And yes the New York Times is under a microscope and everything they do is scrutinized and analyzed unlike any other news organization in the country and maybe the world.
But that is because we need the New York Times unlike any other news organization in the country or maybe the world. They are the paper of record for a reason. They are screwing this up in exactly the same way they have screwed up even more serious stuff in the past and they should have figured that out by now.
It’s not just Maddow pointing out the problem at the NYT. Pundits from Jonathan Capehart at the Washington Post to Greta van Susteren at Fox News have argued that there are indeed a concentrated series of attacks on Hillary Clinton, both from the Republicans on Capitol Hill to the allegedly liberal media.
But it is just Maddow enunciating the core problem: Blatant misogyny. Blatant targeting of Hillary Clinton, the only viable female candidate for president in our collective lifetimes.
And that’s why this matters.
The New York Times’s problem with Hillary Clinton isn’t just a problem for the New York Times, it’s a problem for America. Running a fake story off the front page above the fold and then walking it back piecemeal with no explanation until days later and then said explanation has a surfeit of problems with accountability–what are we to do with that?
At the end of her column Sullivan writes in what can only be termed a petulant tone that the New York Times wouldn’t even have this problem if Hillary Clinton hadn’t had a private email server.
So rather than take responsibility for printing a false story about a former Secretary of State who is also a possible nominee from the Democratic Party for President of the United States, Sullivan still blames Clinton for her paper lying about the candidate when even Washington blogs were printing that the New York Times story was false.
That’s a problem which resonates for the entirety of the presidential campaign. What are we to think when we read about “anonymous sources” in the New York Times in future, especially with regard to Hillary Clinton or any other presidential candidate?
On July 28, the day after the Editor’s Note, we get a column on the New York Times Op-Ed page about Clinton’s favorability ratings that begins: “Is Hillary Rodham Clinton in trouble?”
But it takes four paragraphs to get to this: “None of these claims are supported by the data.”
Oh, okay.
Then this: “[Mrs. Clinton’s ratings] averaged 47 percent favorable/45 percent unfavorable in January and are at 44 percent favorable/48 percent unfavorable now—a relatively modest shift given the onslaught of negative coverage she received during the controversies over her use of private email.”
The remainder of the column is fair and balanced.
But does anyone get there? Or do they stop at Hillary Clinton has unfavorable ratings? (Her unfavorables are lower than any other candidate running from either party except for Bernie Sanders who also polls as unknown to more than half of Americans.)
America is closer than it has ever been to having its first female president. No one has ever garnered as many votes in a contested presidential primary than Hillary Clinton in 2008. And it can be assumed in the 2016 race, the same will be true.
Yet as long as the New York Times continues to, as one commenter on Sullivan’s column said, “defame with intent to destroy” her, how damaged a candidate will she be months into the fray?
Headlines from other news organizations over the past few months tell a story: “Times ‘Not Without Fault’ Says Public Editor” noted Media Matters back in March. “Why Hillary Clinton’s ‘Emailgate’ Is a Fake Scandal” noted Newsweek. There are pages and pages on Google of such headlines. Another article on the New York Times’ Clinton Problem even states flat-out: “The New York Times seems to be actively running a campaign to prevent the election of the first woman president of the United States.”
The fact is, Hillary Clinton is the most powerful woman we’ve had in American politics. That role is not without risk or controversy.
This time the paper of record got caught. It’s important that we remember for future reference that it wasn’t the first time. And that it may not be the last.
Update:
On July 30, Hillary Clinton’s Communications Director, Jennifer Palmieri, made public the campaign’s letter to New York Times Executive Editor, Dean Baquet. The letter delineates the issues of the botched story that ran in the Times on July 23 and the damage they have done to the candidate and her candidacy.