THIS WASN’T “BIAS,” IT WAS COLLUSION: Reporters were ‘reluctant’ to cover the Bill Clinton/Loretta Lynch meeting even if they deny it.
Most people hear claims about media bias and greet them with the same enthusiasm they’d share if they were told the Earth is round or that cotton is white.
Only reporters still act like it’s up for debate.
That’s why when President Trump cited a report this week showing journalists uninterested in last year’s scandalous meeting between Bill Clinton and then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, the pushback from the media was predictably defensive.
The report, published in the Washington Examiner, was based on newly uncovered 2016 emails from Washington Post and New York Times journalists who were contacting Department of Justice officials for information on the meeting, which took place in the heat of the presidential campaign and as Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton was under federal investigation for her private email server.
“E-mails show that the AmazonWashingtonPost and the FailingNewYorkTimes were reluctant to cover the Clinton/Lynch secret meeting in plane,” Trump said Tuesday on Twitter, using his deliciously petty nicknames for the Washington Post and the New York Times.
The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza said the emails actually “show reporters trying to get info from DOJ, checking facts. Pieces were tough & forced Lynch’s semi-recusal.”
Coverage of the meeting was “tough” the way a mother is “tough” on her toddler when she catches him eating a bag of sugar: She’ll send him to his room, but only after she takes a photo of how cute he is.
News of the meeting was first reported by a Phoenix TV station and the New York Times didn’t publish anything about it for more than 24 hours.
That might be loosely related to the paper’s reporter, Mark Landler, emailing a DOJ contact to say he had “been pressed into service to write about the questions being raised” about the meeting.
Reporters today see their mission as government watchdogs clearer than ever — but before Trump’s election, Landler had to be “pressed into service” to even bother.
And when Landler’s report finally made it to daylight, it framed the episode as a “political furor” caused by Republicans who wouldn’t buy Lynch’s excuse that the meeting was, in her words, “primarily social.”
As usual.