You and I must understand entirely different things when we read the phrase "premeditated collusion with the media."
Those media organizations and those journalists may have editorial and personal opinions on who they would prefer to win the election, but there's one thing they care more about than any of those preferences: access.
The idea that the press wouldn't or shouldn't care about vacuuming up every talking point that a campaign is willing to spit out, no matter how obviously-canned it is, is to fundamentally misunderstand the operations of the 24 hour news cycle.
This isn't happening because journos care about Hillary Clinton. This is an alignment of the incentives of politicians and journalists that ultimately reduces transparency and harms public discourse. The fact that the same thing likely isn't happening with the Trump campaign says more about the peculiarities of that campaign than it says anything about the same media companies' willingness to play the same game of ball with Generic Q. Republican.
Glenn Thrush, Politco's Chief Political Correspondent, decided to make it crystal clear in the
following email to Podesta back in April 2015 in which he admits that he has "become a hack."
The email below from Thrush was sent to get guidance related to an article he published the
very next day entitled "Hillary's Big-Money Dilemma."
=============
Because I have become a hack I will send u the whole section that pertains to u
Please don't share or tell anyone I did this
Tell me if I fucked up anything
But how is that a defense? Surely by that token you have no complaints about anything in the world. Just because a person does something unethical for a reward doesn't mean their actions are justified, just rational.
The whole purpose the press existence is to be an independent check on government and to pose to politicians the questions that the electorate cares about.
edit: Just to be clear, nobody (or nearly so) finds your claim controversial or new. It's flaw isn't that it's incorrect, it's that it isn't useful*.
It's not a defense, but it's not a distinction without a difference. If the problem is collusion on behalf of a particular ideology then the solution is different than if it's a problem caused by current models for monetization of news media being driven by short term consumption habits and an attendant compulsion on the part of journalists to get something, anything, new before their peers do even if it's grade F horse shit and they had to sell out to get it.
The rhetoric I was replying to implied that the politicians and the journalists are on the same team because they have the same goals. That's not the case. I think keeping that in mind is plenty useful.
Of course, as The Center for Public Integrity [1] recently pointed out, "journalists" aren't just
making "in-kind" contributions to the Clinton campaign, they're donating real cash as well.
In fact, according the their review of political contributions made by people working in
various media outlets, 96% were found to go to Hillary while only 4% accrued to the benefit
of the Trump campaign.
I'm not stipulating any of my claims on the lack of lopsidedness in the editorial positions of the journalists in question. A Really Big Number doesn't change what they care about more: being on the same team as the Democrats, or their drip-feeds from campaigns.
They're not mutually exclusive (monetary and ideological motivations), and they're actually both true. Not all the time, not unceasingly, but both still present.
If they were motivated purely by money, they'd all be promoting Trump. He has driven a shocking amount of traffic / wealth to all journalist outlets. Stories they write on him are massively more popular, and he's demonstrated he'll cut off access for their lying. So if it was just money, pussy grabbing would be a good thing.
If they thought that far ahead, they'd fall behind. They live from headline to headline. The fact that Trump is chum right before the election instead of Clinton is partially stochastic and depended far more on the immediate reception to the stories than anything else.
I thought your thesis was that there was no actual collusion between politicians and the media, just aligned incentives. I agree with your point about the incentives, but don't you agree that this email shows that there was in fact actual collusion going on as well? The evidence seems pretty compelling to me.
The politico guy being a self-confessed hack just reeks of the same problems we would expect to arise from a chaotic system driven by short term interests. The notion that the media is cooperating with Clinton's campaign in order to make her win is contraindicated by the attention they paid to the Benghazi hearings and the email server. The Access Hollywood video simply emerged after those things stopped being news. They've taken priority over Podesta's emails because a) sex, and b) if you're not already a Trump supporter or a Bernie-or-Buster, they're mostly a nothing-burger.
They were very silent on the entire email server business. Did they mention it reluctantly a few times? Sure. But they failed to mention a million other things that you probably are ignorant of, if you rely on them for information.
They did not mention that the deleted emails were deleted AFTER the subpoena was issued [1]. They did not mention that Clinton aides carried hammers with them to destroy phones in case the phones were demanded by the FBI. They did not comment on the number of "I don't remember" answers that Clinton gave to the FBI. They did not comment on the fact that Clinton claimed to not remember what a "c" meant on documents. They did not comment on the fact that Clinton claimed to have no memory of receiving training on the handling of sensitive documents. I could go on for pages, but I have work to do.
Suffice it to say that the media have been complicit in matters dating back years before Podesta emails, not days or weeks. Your contention that they just aren't reporting the Podesta emails because they're boring (they are not, they are dynamite) is false on it's face.
> They did not mention that the deleted emails were deleted AFTER the subpoena was issued
Yet they were requested to be deleted long before the subpoena was issued[1]. Specifically:
In December 2014, after the work-related emails were preserved, Mills told Platte River Networks – which at the time was managing Clinton’s private server – that Clinton “decided she no longer needed access to any of her e-mails older than 60 days.” Mills instructed the PRN employee — who was not identified — “to modify the e-mail retention policy” on Clinton’s server “to reflect this change,” the FBI said.
But the PRN employee mistakenly did not make the retention-policy change and did not delete the old emails until sometime between March 25 and March 31, even though Mills had sent PRN an email on March 9 that mentioned the committee’s request to preserve emails.
The PRN employee who deleted the emails was a recipient of Mills’ message. However, the employee told the FBI that “he had an ‘oh shit’ moment and sometime between March 25-31, 2015 deleted the Clinton archive mailbox from the PRN server and used BleachBit to delete the exported .PST files he had created on the server containing Clinton’s e-mails.”
Read into that whatever you want, but the fact that it's not really true might have something to do with why it isn't being reported on.
> They did not mention that Clinton aides carried hammers with them to destroy phones in case the phones were demanded by the FBI.
That's not what happened[2]. As secretary of defense, she had old phones after she switched destroyed.
> I could go on for pages, but I have work to do.
You could substantiate your statements with sources. You could have done that from the beginning. Perhaps if you looked for less biased and more fact based sources rather than blogs that feature a giant picture of Clinton snapped in an inopportune moment with giant neon green letters saying "LOL!" photoshopped on.
> Your contention that they just aren't reporting the Podesta emails because they're boring (they are not, they are dynamite) is false on it's face.
Well, I've been following and reading reporting on the emails. It's all pretty ho-hum and what I would expect from any campaign so far. Of course, it's easy to taking boring things out of context and imagine salacious components to them. That doesn't make them any more damning in reality though.
Can I just point out as per source 1, that as a public employee, she doesn't just get to decide to destroy records? Further, she claims she wanted them deleted then, but never clarifies if they were deleted at the time of request or when the subpoena arrived.
Further, she didn't just delete emails, she went and wiped the hard drive. Perhaps just good data practice, but, when it comes to politics and public servants I'm far too cynical to believe that. Finally, she determined what was considered private and deleted it. Do you really trust that? Do you really think that things that were work related wouldn't get swept up with the personal stuff while they were going about deleting things?
Either way, I've heard rumors they've been recovered, so disagreements there could be resolved in due time. If not, we can argue then :)
> Can I just point out as per source 1, that as a public employee, she doesn't just get to decide to destroy records?
If they are personal records, she does, because they are her personal property, and are covered under her fourth amendment rights until they are specifically requested by subpoena. I'm not sure if the subpoena requested all email, or work email. The question really being asked usually is whether they were all actually personal emails or not.
I think it's worth noting that her behavior with regard to deleting personal emails is not out of what would be considered normal for someone completely innocent. If I knew I was innocent but was under subpoena for work email and I had personal email that I would really rather not get out, I might delete them as well before turning everything over. Unless specififed not to, there's nothing illegal with doing so, as long as you can whether any flak if people want to cast doubt.
It's worth noting the Podesta emails address this[1]. One of the interesting thing about the Podesta email summaries I've seen is how they don't really corroborate any of the accusations we've seen.
> Further, she claims she wanted them deleted then, but never clarifies if they were deleted at the time of request or when the subpoena arrived.
It seems pretty well covered to me. She specified she wanted them deleted months prior to the subpoena, but the employee did not act on that command until much later (after the subpoena arrived). So, emails were deleted after a subpoena arrived, but the request to do so happened long prior to that.
> Further, she didn't just delete emails, she went and wiped the hard drive. Perhaps just good data practice, but, when it comes to politics and public servants I'm far too cynical to believe that.
It's your right to be cynical. That said, as I mentioned above, unless the subpoena should have covered personal emails, I'm not sure what she did was wrong, even if it does cast doubt on whether we can be sure we got all the work emails.
> Finally, she determined what was considered private and deleted it. Do you really trust that? Do you really think that things that were work related wouldn't get swept up with the personal stuff while they were going about deleting things?
Actually, I believe her lawyers determined that. They didn't actually read all the emails though, they used Subject lines and addresses. That said, while it might have miscategorized some (and some were lost prior to that for reasons explained in that summary), that process is unlikely to have randomly happened to remove all majorly incriminating emails, so you're still left with whether you trust the lawyers tasked with reviewing them or not.
What this all really comes down to is whether you think someone can really get away with criminal activity at this level for decades. My belief is that if there was real evidence in any of the umpteen things she's been investigated for, we'd have seen it. Instead, we have lots of accusations, but nothing ever seems to add up to anything. This lends itself to two conclusions, either the Clintons are masterminds at committing crime and never getting caught, or they have been a favored political target due to their high political profile for an extended period of time. Considering I think even if they originally where complicit in a problem or too long in their past, the return on investment for piddly amounts of money (to them) for what amount to favors seems a stupid trade-off. If you make millions of dollars a year, and are already one of the most powerful people in the world, why would you get caught up in the stupid things she's accused of, like taking a large donation to her charity, which she can't really use, in order to get a meeting? To my sensibilities, it's much more likely that someone donated to one of her charities in hope that it would help (or on bad info that it would help), and maybe it did help, but in the same way that donating to the Red Cross would have, by showing the person was a philanthropist and making a good impression that way.
>You and I must understand entirely different things when we read the phrase "premeditated collusion with the media."
Agreed.
>Those media organizations and those journalists may have editorial and personal opinions on who they would prefer to win the election, but there's one thing they care more about than any of those preferences: access.
The idea that the press wouldn't or shouldn't care about vacuuming up every talking point that a campaign is willing to spit out, no matter how obviously-canned it is, is to fundamentally misunderstand the operations of the 24 hour news cycle.
I was trained as a journalist before I became an engineer. I'd argue I understand this stuff better than most. Perhaps I had the benefit of a journalism program that was better than it had any right to be, but we had ethics drilled into us pretty heavily. I can assure you the things in those emails between the press and the Clinton campaign are shameful on a journalistic ethics front.
Further, if you want to buy into the philosophy behind the press and why it's given so much leeway in American law, then their fundamental role is to serve as the fourth estate. It's supposed to be the role of the press to take an adversarial stance to government and hold them accountable. Clearly this doesn't happen much, but worse still, the Podesta emails reveal that they're actively facilitating the goals of a presidential nominee. That's horrible. If you want an off-topic thing to look into for this, look up Amber Lyons. I had her in the 'maybe she's credible' pile until this came out. Now she's in the 'There's something to her claims' pile.
>the peculiarities of that campaign than it says anything about the same media companies' willingness to play the same game of ball with Generic Q. Republican.
Most news organizations are staffed with people who lean fairly heavily to the left. It sounds like you might be surprised to find out just how much. It used to be the case, and was what I was taught, that you fought your bias as much as possible, did your best to avoid editorializing and didn't let yourself just become a mouth piece. There's a reason why someone picks up the New York Times rather than combing through the press releases from the Clinton & Trump campaigns. Obviously Fox News is the notable dissenter in providing this kind of service to Republican candidates. Still, if you run the numbers it's something like 80% / 20%.
Overall, the thing that has been pretty evident to me during this campaign, even before the Podesta leaks, is that the bulk of the press has decided to burn their credibility in promoting Clinton. This even goes back to when she was campaigning against Sanders for the nomination, though to a lesser extent. I think the moment something smelled off to me was when she won the six coin tosses in Iowa (?) to begin the primaries and I didn't see many eyebrows raised in the reporting I looked at. Maybe I missed it, but since then They've held to a pretty consistent pattern of burning bridges to protect her.
You wrote a good post and I apologize in advance if my reply doesn't do it justice. I'm on mobile.
> I can assure you the things in those emails between the press and the Clinton campaign are shameful on a journalistic ethics front.
And programmers get taught to write documentation and not make things work with hacks or produce spaghetti code. The way the sausage gets made not comporting with professional standards is neither unheard of nor is it isolated to journalism.
They're being shameful, yes. But they're doing it because it's a living, not because they have an agenda.
> if you want to buy into the philosophy behind the press and why it's given so much leeway in American law, then their fundamental role is to serve as the fourth estate
Off-topic, but I don't. I view all media -- explicitly biased and ostensibly not alike -- as fully protected under the umbrella of free speech, for which I am an irrationally ardent proponent.
We can make objective claims about our present media not doing a very good job at informing society without getting into that, though. Our principal disagreement seems to be about why that's happening. You seem to want to ascribe agency to it. I think that's a mistake, in the aggregate. Maybe I'm just being a cynic, but I don't think so.
> the bulk of the press has decided to burn their credibility in promoting Clinton
I'm not a fan of Clinton by any stretch of the imagination. I see how Clinton scandals get significantly less airtime than Trump scandals, but I have a hard time believing that isn't being driven by ratings. Trump has been graded on a heck of a curve at times, in ways that can't be considered "objective."
> I see how Clinton scandals get significantly less airtime than Trump scandals
I'm honestly unsure at this point how to take any specific cry about a Clinton scandal, and it's a problem of the Republicans' (and Trump's) making. You can only cry wolf so many times, so loudly, again and again for the exact same incident even, until people assume you can't be trusted to watch for wolves at all.
No worries about being on mobile. For my part, I've made the mistake of replying to your responses to other people, which is kinda dumb and confuses our conversation. So I'll take the blame if it all unravels. Without further ado:
>And programmers get taught to write documentation
That isn't an ethics issue, it's disingenuous to compare the two (not trying to ascribe malice to you). I do recognize the point you're trying to make in terms of quality being sacrificed to business concerns, and I'll touch on that (a bit indirectly) in a moment.
>Off-topic, but I don't. I view all media -- explicitly biased and ostensibly not alike -- as fully protected under the umbrella of free speech
Two things here. 1.) You (presumably) aren't and have never been a journalist or tried to be one. I assure you that this is a thing that sits at the heart of American Journalist philosophy, at least as I experienced it. I probably shouldn't have phrased it in a way that let you have an opinion. Also, sorry for the appeal to authority :) 2.) The first amendment specifically calls out religion, press and assembly. There was a vision for the role of press in government; they aren't within a country mile of living up to that but still enjoy the freedom. 2a.) We can agree on rabid amounts of free speech at least, and despite press failings I don't want to take away their freedom to print whatever.
>We can make objective claims about our present media not doing a very good job at informing society without getting into that, though. Our principal disagreement seems to be about why that's happening.
Yeah, that would just be a diversion. Let's leave it, as I imagine we agree anyway.
>You seem to want to ascribe agency to it
Well, to cheat and be a jerk: All people have agency. To be more honest, I think there's a mix of business concerns and ideology. As I was trying to point out, Trump has made them a shitload of money. He's probably the best thing that's ever happened to print and cable news, at least in the last decade. Even were they to report on him honestly, he would make them a shitload of money. He's controversial without them needing to help.
This might just be something that I will fail to convey to you, but my experience from a (kind of) insider's view, is that most journalists are partisan. Nobody has to love that, it's an acknowledged reality, and uncontroversial (for any journalist with credibility). The trouble is that the effort or even pretense of trying to mitigate bias has gone away, which I don't think you disagree with. Something that might be less known to you is that most credible news outlets try to make it a point to separate the business concerns from editorial concerns for just this reason. At least publicly that is certainly the case. Theoretically there's a publicist and an executive editor, and the two manage their respective departments without consultation. We're probably both cynical enough to realize they're full of shit, but that rule didn't come out of a vacuum and was adhered to in the one paper I wrote for (though I was freelancing / interning so obviously my insight was limited). Additionally, you might be familiar with the idea of an ombudsman. Theoretically, this is a person who is paid by the paper to shit all over it when it fucks up. It's painful but necessary. Clearly these people aren't doing their jobs.
My point is that, at least historically, and recently at that, papers have acknowledged bias and at least made a reasonable effort to counter it. In another comment, maybe from you, business concerns have taken a toll. Consolidation mixed with adopting modern, short-sighted executive level business decisions have had a deleterious effect on quality. C-levels aren't trained in, and don't care about, the ethics training journalists get, and anyone given free reign to indulge their bias is going to struggle to resist that. I guess I'm not saying that you're necessarily wrong, but rather that there's been a decay in journalism (caused by your opinion) that's resulted in the present conditions (caused by my opinion).
This is already so long 90% of people aren't going to read it, so I'll leave it here: Because of my previous passion for journalism, the current failures deeply pain me, and have been more of my focus than the candidates. The failure is not caused just by business concerns, but people gleefully letting their bias loose and enjoying their ethical lapse. We can probably both agree it's a disservice to the country and will hasten the demise of print and cable news. But in the meantime they will reap the seductive gains of short term thinking. I'll save predictions for the future for another time.
I hope you're stuck on a bus or something where this screed is a welcome diversion :)
I'll admit that I'm far enough out of my depth that I can't compete with the level of detail your opinion, informed by your professional experience, espouses. So I'll have to concede that there are clearly things I don't know about bias in journalism and thank you for an excellent distraction :-)
Those media organizations and those journalists may have editorial and personal opinions on who they would prefer to win the election, but there's one thing they care more about than any of those preferences: access.
The idea that the press wouldn't or shouldn't care about vacuuming up every talking point that a campaign is willing to spit out, no matter how obviously-canned it is, is to fundamentally misunderstand the operations of the 24 hour news cycle.
This isn't happening because journos care about Hillary Clinton. This is an alignment of the incentives of politicians and journalists that ultimately reduces transparency and harms public discourse. The fact that the same thing likely isn't happening with the Trump campaign says more about the peculiarities of that campaign than it says anything about the same media companies' willingness to play the same game of ball with Generic Q. Republican.