[erimir]

Originally Posted by davidm

It’s amazing that you can’t grasp the role of the news media in a free society.

The media is a vital part of a free society, but they have no responsibility in their reporting on politics and elections to calibrate their coverage of a scandal relative to its importance to governance or its effects on the country.

If the FBI is investigating Hillary Clinton’s emails, then the news media is obviously going to report that. Failure to do so would be a derliction of professional responsibility.

There's a hell of a lot of space between "report on Clinton's emails multiple times more than you report on all her policies combined" and "don't report on them at all". Nobody has ever said not to report on them at all.

A point which has been made to you multiple times but which you refuse to acknowledge, because you are a dishonest person. You can't argue against it, so you always, always revert to your straw man argument. You are exactly the sort of person who should not be working for a newspaper.

If the FBI investigation of Clinton was bogus, blame the FBI instead of shooting the messenger. How hard is that to get?

So you're saying the media should abdicate its responsibility in this case and accept that if there's an FBI investigation, it really is important, it has a real chance of finding a crime*, it is relevant to governance and it has no bias.

I assume you will be applying this standard to all investigations of Trump and Russia, eh? When the media sees the FBI investigating Trump, asking them to apply any skepticism or proportionality means you are like Nixon and Trump and want them to be propagandists!

When MSNBC or other outlets have Brennan and Hayden and other military/intelligence "Deep State" officials on and uncritically broadcasts their pronouncements, these decisions cannot be questioned! Blame the Deep State instead of shooting the messenger!

Does anyone expect davidm to exhibit this consistency? Anyone? To even ask it is to laugh. Everyone knows you're full of shit. The media shouldn't trust the FBI or CIA, except when it comes to someone you dislike. That is the only principle here.

*This is most important when it comes to the Abedin/Weiner laptop. It was entirely predictable that Abedin's laptop, checking the same email account, would have entirely or almost entirely the same emails on it (if you check your email on computer A, those emails will generally still appear when you check them on computer B), and the chance that any emails not found on her other computers would not have been found on other State Dept email accounts and would contain proof of criminal activity was extremely low.

As for Elizabeth Warren, if she was truly that dishonest and stupid as to call herself a Native American when clearly she is not even close to that, then that is her fault, not the fault of the Washington Post, which had not just the right but the duty to report her transparent lie. If it sinks her candidacy, too bad for her. She will have only herself to blame.

And with the future of the country at stake, asking the media to prioritize reporting on things that actually matter for the future of the country is just too much to ask.

And I understand her family story is influenced by dominant white narratives as well as the history of mixed African-Americans passing as Native American to avoid anti-black discrimination, etc. There are lots of white Americans who claim Native ancestry who can't really substantiate it and have no connection in their lives to Native American communities, and it is problematic. But most of these people are unaware of these issues and since it's usually just a family story it rarely acquires any public importance. (I have friends who claim distant Native heritage but I'm skeptical considering it likely they don't, or that it is more distant than they think and so distant as to be irrelevant.) But the evidence seems to be clear that she did not gain unfair advantages out of this, and it is not really an important story for how she would govern except as it relates to Native American issues, where she rightfully has some work to do but appears to be making an effort.

But what did this WaPo story really tell us that we didn't know? Nothing really. We already knew she claimed Native American heritage in the past. There might be a wrinkle here ("it was in her own handwriting!") but fundamentally this story does almost nothing except pull it back into the spotlight to continue asking questions that have already been answered. Why is it the media's responsibility to look for every little scrap to report on even when it doesn't really change the story? Should they devote half of their reporting on Warren to documenting every single time Warren claimed to be Native American? Is that their "duty"? Why isn't it their duty to apply some fucking discretion and report on things that actually affect Americans?