Political Scandals

Almost a week since the 2016 election and ABC’s World News Tonight spent an over three minute segment Monday night seemingly mourning for Hillary Clinton’s defeat at the hands of Donald Trump. “Acknowledging the pain and placing a good deal of the blame, she says, on the FBI director,” reported ABC Anchor David Muir of Clinton’s weekend call to supporters and donors, “[James Comey] brought the e-…

William Finnegan's lengthy report from Venezuela in the November 14 edition of the New Yorker begs two obvious questions: Where have you guys been? And why did you wait until the wee hours on November 7, the day before Election Day in the U.S., when almost everyone's attention was on the presidential and other contests, to post it online? The report's headline asks a question: "How did this…

For the but-tell-us-how-you-really-feel file, this headline on a Friday post by Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum: “Fuck You, James Comey.” The post, of course, centered on the presumed effect on presidential voting of Comey’s October 28 letter which jump-started the Hillary Clinton e-mail story. “When an election is close…there are dozens of people, events, and movements that can make a difference…

The Associated Press and reporter Josh Lederman are feeling sorry for outgoing President Barack Obama. Shortly after 9 a.m. on Saturday morning, in advance of Obama's last foreign tour, the AP's headline at Lederman's dispatch read: "On last foreign tour, Obama must find a way to explain Trump." Lederman wrote that our poor, put-upon president "must pivot and reassure the U.S. and other…

In their respective articles alleging that the mainstream media facilitated the election of Donald Trump, Brian Beutler of The New Republic and Eric Alterman of The Nation overlapped somewhat. For example, each claimed that the Hillary e-mail story was wildly overcovered, with Beutler citing it as the shining example of how the media “failed abysmally” regarding the “framing and contextualizing…

On Monday's New Day on CNN, as a panel of regular CNN political analysts fretted that FBI Director James Comey has hurt Hillary Clinton's "momentum" and boosted Donald Trump with the recent resumption of activity in the Clinton email investigation, CNN political analyst David Gregory repeated his recent claim that Trump is speaking like a "tyrant" in calling for his opponent to be jailed and in…

Conservatives are unwilling to let Hillary be Hillary where transparency is concerned, and “it drives them crazy,” believes Kevin Drum. In a post last Wednesday, Drum argued that whenever the right has “forced…openness on Clinton in an effort to destroy her,” it’s “done nothing except paint a portrait of a pretty normal politician,” a failure that’s left those conservatives with “bizarre levels”…

On Monday's GMA, ABC's George Stephanopoulos hounded Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway on James Conway announcing that the FBI would not change its findings on the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal. The Clinton Foundation donor wondered, "Do you accept [Comey's] finding now?" Stephanopoulos also played up that Comey "said that no reasonable prosecutor would bring the case, and the…

On Monday's New Day, during a segment with Wisconsin Republican Rep. Sean Duffy, CNN anchor Chris Cuomo made his latest claim that FBI Director James Comey found that Hillary Clinton did not commit a crime in her handling of her State Department work email, even though the FBI director merely declined to recommend trying to prosecute her without directly stating his view on whether she committed…

With Election Day just two days away, both ABC and NBC seemingly continued to try to slow Hillary Clinton’s descent in the polls, Sunday, by downplaying all the talk surrounding multiple FBI investigations into her activities. On ABC's This Week, Clinton lackey George Stephanopoulos tried to shutdown such talk from Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus by flippantly declaring, “You're just…

On Thursday, the web site of The Atlantic magazine published a column one would have in saner times expected to see at a misandrist outfit like Jezebel. Chimamanda Adichie's rapturous praise of Hillary Clinton claimed that those who loathe Mrs. Clinton do so because she "offended the old patriarchal order," that her "congenital liar" label has stuck only because "she was a first lady who refused…

New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who’s also Donald Trump’s transition director, was not a defendant in the Bridgegate trial, in which two of Christie’s allies were just convicted on all counts. Still, argues New York’s Chait, the verdicts “would shake up an ordinary presidential election,” since Trump himself has said that Christie “totally knew about” Bridgegate, and since the Donald has made…

The Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal involves no wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton, contends Matthew Yglesias. So whose behavior has been scandalous? The media’s. “Emailgate, like so many Clinton pseudo-scandals before it, is bullshit,” wrote Yglesias in a Michael Kinsley-esque Friday piece. “The real scandal here is the way a story that was at best of modest significance came to dominate the US…

A Wednesday column at Vanity Fair by former National Public Radio CEO Ken Stern started on a promising track, but ended up in the same place as the rest of the establishment press: Donald Trump must lose, even if the press has to abandon all semblance of fairness and objectivity to accomplish that task. Stern observed the obviously unbalanced presidential race coverage at the Washington Post with…