Moyers & Company on the media's unfair treatment of Hillary

[Native]

The bigger point is this: whatever you may think of the Clintons, the scandals didn’t create the meme of untrustworthiness about them. The meme of untrustworthiness created the scandals. The media just kept hunting for those scandals as confirmation of what they had already determined. That is how so many in the MSM work — backwards from presumption to incident. It also happens to be the surest path to career advancement for journalistic opportunists.

And on the millions of FBI agents assigned to the email drama:

The error that has gotten the most attention from press critics is the number of FBI agents supposedly assigned to the case: 147! And from where did that number come? An unnamed “lawmaker” who said he had been briefed by FBI Director James Comey. Do you suppose that lawmaker was a Republican out to get Clinton, and do you suppose that a journalist looking for the truth ought to have been highly skeptical of such a source? The actual number was said to be under 50, and even that, FBI experts told NBC, was probably substantially overstated.

This is no small mistake. Nor is it necessarily an honest one. The entire article could only have been intended to hurt Clinton politically. At a time when rightwing websites are rubbing their hands in glee over the prospect of Clinton being indicted (fat chance), this is big, and it deserved both a giant retraction and self-flagellating penance from the paper. It got neither. As for the scandal itself, see Kurt Eichenwald’s take in Newsweek because you certainly won’t see this kind of analysis anywhere else in the MSM for the simple but unethical reason that the media don’t want to kill the story any more than the Republicans do. It’s just too delicious.

And in conclusion:

No, Hillary Clinton isn’t without sin. No candidate is. But she has been deliberately and unfairly abused by the press for years, her motives always impugned, her gaffes blown out of proportion, her missteps always attributed not to miscalculations or ordinary human foible but to deep character flaws. (Just Google “Hillary Clinton” and “character.”)

http://billmoyers.com/story/the-media-have-a-hillary-story-and-theyre-sticking-to-it/

[WhiteTara]

1. Here comes the bus!

[radical noodle]

2. K&R

Why is it that so-called Democrats cannot understand this?

[Thinkingabout]

3. Hate and jealously. Here is a couple who worked hard and played by the rules,

Amassed a large net worth and so many people hate them for this. I am happy they moved up, he became president not because of his father's connections like the Bushes did but because they worked hard.

[Native]

4. Because the media is working overtime to keep them from understanding.

I wish to hell the Fairness Doctrine was back in place. 1987 - the year Reagan killed it.

[SharonClark]

5. The leftists and 'independents-now-registered-as Dems'

are working overtime against Hillary. Just check out DailyKos and Salon for article after article slamming Hillary.

[Native]

10. Salon & HuffPo are the worst, but I've only seen pro-Hill posts by Kos. nt

[Hekate]

6. KnR for Bill Moyers

[Lucinda]

7. KNR Thank you!

[DemonGoddess]

8. K&R!

The media never much liked the Clintons to begin with. In this election season of anti-elitism, one reason why is instructive for its condescension. As Sally Quinn, Washington Post writer and society doyenne (she was executive editor Ben Bradlee’s wife), put it in a famous, huffy 1998 article, the Clintons had sullied the White House and Washington had “been brought into disrepute by the actions of the president.” What she was really saying was that they were country bumpkins, not part of the ritzy DC establishment that she inhabited, and they needed to be punished for it. The irony is that rather than scorn the establishment that scorned them, the Clintons got into some trouble trying desperately to enter it.

You know, this brought to mind something I read years ago about Truman and his wife. Because he was a haberdasher before becoming President, he was snubbed by society for not being "one of them".

[Surya Gayatri]

9. Enormous K & R. Thanks for posting. Bravo, Mr. Moyers.