Why Hillary Clinton's Book Is Worth Reading - The Atlantic - 0 views
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I don’t understand why there’s an insatiable demand in many quarters for me to take all the blame for losing the election on my own shoulders and quit talking about Comey, the Russians, fake news, sexism, or anything else. Many in the political media don’t want to hear about how those things tipped the election in the final days. They say their beef is that I’m not taking responsibility for my mistakes—but I have, and I do again throughout this book. Their real problem is that they can’t bear to face their own role in helping elect Trump, from providing him free airtime to giving my emails three times more coverage than all the issues affecting people’s lives combined.
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next on the list would be prevailing judgments in the media, led unmistakably by The New York Times, that treated her “damned emails” as if they were a first-order emergency, justifying more coverage than anything she said on issues of international or domestic policy, and deserving of placement on a par with the financial, ethical, experiential, and other liabilities of Donald Trump.
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I will say that two bits of coverage from the Times—which matter precisely because it is the best overall U.S. publication, and the most influential—deserve far more introspection that the paper has deigned to give them.
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For comparison, what people had heard about Donald Trump at the same stage, according to the same Gallup poll:
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First, a Gallup word-cloud image of what voters associated with Hillary Clinton in the summer of 2015:
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One was its blow-out-the-front-page treatment after James Comey talked about re-opening the email investigation, less than two weeks before the election. This was in keeping with the Times’s emphasis through many months on the “doubts” and “questions” that Clinton’s email practices “raised”:
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And here is how it shaped up as the campaign intensified last summer, from the time of the party conventions through the beginning of the Clinton-Trump debates:
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No sane person can believe that the consequences of last fall’s election—for foreign policy, for race relations, for the environment, for anything else you’d like to name (from either party’s perspective)—should have depended more than about 1 percent on what Hillary Clinton did with her emails. But this objectively second- or third-tier issue came across through even our best news organizations as if it were the main thing worth knowing about one of the candidates.
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No sane person can believe that the consequences of last fall’s election—for foreign policy, for race relations, for the environment, for anything else you’d like to name (from either party’s perspecti
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But the press is among the groups that messed this up, badly, in particular through the relentless push in New York Times coverage that made “but, her emails!” a rueful post-campaign meme. With this book, Hillary Clinton has gone a considerable distance toward facing her responsibility for the current state of the country. Before any news organization tells her to pipe down or stop explaining herself, I’d like to see them be as honest about their own responsibility