On Jared Kushner's emails, the real problem is the media's hypocrisy
By Paul Waldman September 25 at 2:07 PM
There are few things we in the media love more than a good hypocrisy story, which allows us to replay the oft-told narrative that politicians and those who work for them are fundamentally dishonest. And as hypocrisy stories go, this one’s a doozy:
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Republicans will not, of course, be chanting “Lock him up! Lock him up!” and launching 14 separate congressional investigations of this unconscionable breach of responsible email practices on the part of the president’s closest adviser. Why, it’s almost as though they were never really all that concerned about IT security!
So yes, Republicans are hypocrites. But the real hypocrisy here, the one with damaging results, isn’t theirs. It belongs to the news media.
The truth is that there are very few things that each party won’t condemn when the other side does it but defend when their own side does it. But it’s the job of the press to sort out what’s meaningful from what isn’t. In the context of a campaign, both sides will toss any criticism of their opponent that’s handy up against the wall to see what sticks. And in that metaphor, the media is the wall. Something sticks when the individuals who make decisions at newspapers, television networks and other media outlets decide that the story in question deserves extended coverage.
Kushner’s emails are probably going to get the appropriate level of attention — which is to say, about 1/1000th of the coverage Clinton’s emails got. The story will be around for a couple of days, it’ll be a little embarrassing for him, and then everyone will move on. Which is exactly what should have happened to the Clinton email story, given everything we know now. It was at worst a misdemeanor, but it was treated by the media like the Crime of the Century.
As studies of the coverage of the campaign confirmed, the Clinton email story got more coverage than any issue — more than the economy, or health care, or immigration, or climate change or anything else. Throughout the general election, as Gallup found, the word Americans were most likely to mention when they were asked what they had heard about Clinton was “email.”
That didn’t just happen. It was the product of decisions made every day by reporters, editors and TV producers. They said, again and again, “This is the story that needs to be covered right now.”
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/09/25/on-jared-kushners-emails-the-real-problem-is-the-medias-hypocrisy
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We need a new "Fairness Doctrine" that would work for all media.
There is a new form of illiteracy growing in the nation as well--memes, gifs, and sensational headlines give the argument without any substantive content. While they can be useful we have too many people that no longer use reason. Not a good place for us to be.
