Monday, July 27, 2015

The Left Eats Itself; Hillary/NYT Edition

Hillary camp rips NY Times, but email story still dogs her

"Hillary Clinton’s email mess has been like a low-grade fever that keeps returning in nastier form.

And the problem is she’s never taken the cure—by answering all the outstanding questions—as part of her media-averse approach.

Now the Clinton campaign is on the offense against the New York Times, branding its latest story on the controversy “false” and “discredited.”

“This incident shows the danger of relying on reckless, inaccurate leaks from partisan sources," the campaign says.
Leftist journalism seems to be turning on Clinton; this time it is the NYT. But Clinton still has some juice, and the NYT backed up into passive mode:
The paper has been taking a lot of heat for softening the wording of the lead paragraph after a complaint from the Clinton camp.

This regularly happens with newspapers, by the way, and changes are made between editions if the editors and reporters feel they have gotten something wrong or used overstated language. Now it happens instantaneously online—but in that culture, the Times had a responsibility to tell readers that it was weakening the story. This was hardly a routine change in a routine story, and that undermines faith in the paper.

The original story said that two inspectors general were asking Justice to consider a criminal probe of “whether Hillary Rodham Clinton mishandled sensitive government information on a private email account she used as secretary of State.”

The revised version had the investigators making the referral based on “whether sensitive government information was mishandled in connection with the personal email account Hillary Rodham Clinton used as secretary of State.”

The passive construction might seem minor, since any probe would involve the same private Hillary emails. But the wording of the first version does insinuate that Hillary might be a target of such a probe; the second does not.

After nearly a day of being hammered by journalists and media critics, the Times did post a correction:
“An earlier version of this article and an earlier headline, ​using information from senior government officials, misstated the nature of the referral to the Justice Department regarding Hillary Clinton’s personal email account while she was secretary of state. The referral addressed the potential compromise of classified information in connection with that personal email account. It did not specifically request an investigation into Mrs. Clinton.”
This only fuels the controversy surrounding the nature of emails she was sending from a private server rather than using a State Department account."
So if they are not investigating Clinton, then who, exactly, are they investigating? Who must fall on their sword to protect the queen this time? And will the NYT be kind to Clinton in the future, after this public kick in the nether parts? Stay tuned...

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