How the Media Handled Clinton and Javanka Email Servers

My piece about why people hate Hillary Clinton was one of the most popular posts in this humble blog's history.

(The popular posts in the right margin is compiled by Blogger according to the number of hits)

I maintained that Hillary was vilified so often, so relentlessly and for so long that it was a miracle that she won the popular vote. The one story that cost her the election was the so-called emailgate.

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.”

It was a no story but the media covered it like it was the crime of the century: 560,397 news items in a period of 18 months.

Compare that, as I did, with an actual email crime committed by Bush fils: During his presidency, White House officials purged millions of emails to cover up their search for a pretext for the Iraq War and the mass firing of Attorney Generals to replace them with wingnuts.

Moreover, 95 percent of senior Bush advisers' emails were stored on RNC mail servers in direct contravention of 1978 Presidential Record Act.

They were huge scandals involving real criminal behavior but the corporate media could not be bothered.

The pattern continues.

When it was revealed that Mike Pence had used a private email account, the same people who attacked Clinton viciously claimed that it wasn't the same thing since she had a server and he did not.

So no hypocrisy there, they said. If there was a server, yeah, maybe we might have looked into it.

The same thing happened when Politico reported that Boy Blunder had a private mail account and he had been conducting some White House business on that. The media that excoriated Clinton was fine with that. It was just an account, they said. Nothing more.

His lawyer, happy for the assist, concurred. There were less than 100 emails about the White House he said and Jared forwarded them all to his White House address to make sure he complied with the law.

So, no hypocrisy there either.

Then came the news that, most White House staffers, including Steve Bannon, Gary Cohn, Reince Priebus, Stephen Miller and Ivanka and Jared Kushner conducted official White House business using private email accounts. As I noted, in the case of White House (unlike the State Department) doing so and not preserving those emails is a crime.

Reaction: Nothing outside the narrow circle of news junkies.

Finally, it has just been disclosed that Ivana and Jared had an email server set up under the domain name ijkfamily.com.

And both Ivanka and Jared conducted official White House business on that server involving thousands of email messages.

Corporate media reaction?

Nary a peep.

The same setup that warranted hundreds of thousands of front page stories for Clinton, was mentioned by a few media outlets once or twice. And that was it.

Recently, Paul Waldman made a very astute observation. He argued that the whole Hillary emailgate was the product of a deliberate set of decisions by editors, reporters and producers to cover it obsessively.

Why did they make those decisions? I’d argue that they had long operated on the assumption that Bill and Hillary Clinton were deeply corrupt, and it was their responsibility to find evidence for that assumption and then disseminate it. If a particular allegation turned out to be baseless and didn’t actually support the assumption of corruption, they would say that it was still worth extended discussion, because it “raised questions.” In the end, the public is essentially unable to distinguish between a thousand stories about something that shows Hillary Clinton being corrupt and a thousand stories about something that “raises questions” about Clinton being corrupt but doesn’t actually demonstrate any corruption.

The amazing part is that they were doing this while she was running against the most corrupt politician in modern American history.

In hindsight, those editorial decisions look positively deranged. On one side, you had a candidate who had a long history as a con artist — just before assuming the presidency, he was forced to pay $25 million to the victims of one of his schemes — and a career full of shady deals, broken promises and associations with grifters, swindlers and mobsters. On the other side, you had a candidate who used the wrong email.

The contrast between how a different media narrative was created for each candidate was the key to Trump's success.

The problem wasn’t so much that the copious examples of Trump’s personal corruption weren’t covered individually. It was that most of the time, each scam, fleeced vendor or questionable real estate deal was covered briefly and then seldom revisited. It didn’t add up to a coherent, sustained media narrative about Trump in the same way that the press created a narrative about Clinton’s supposed corruption.

After the November elections, I blamed the corporate media for her defeat.

Not Russian hackers, not Facebook but the New York Times, the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and the rest of them.

Sure, Facebook is as guilty as any one of them but at least they can blame their algorithms or point the finger to clickbait trols in Eastern Europe.

But the hypocritical and biased reporting of mainstream media was what made President Donald J Trump possible.

And their lenient approach to Trump Administration's email setups proves this one more time.

IOKIYAR exists because of the corporate media.