Campaign watch: Another major press corps "mistake!"

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 30, 2016

Latest innocent "mistake" damages Candidate Clinton: Jill Abramson will tell you it's all about the sexism.

Surely, Abramson knows it isn't as simple as that. We refer to the latest major "mistake" about the probe of Hillary Clinton's emails.

This latest "mistake" has now produced the latest correction. The correction has now been offered by the Washington Post:

CORRECTION (3/30/16): An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that Clinton used two different email addresses, sometimes interchangeably, as secretary of state. She used only hdr22@clintonemail.com as secretary of state. Also, an earlier version of this article reported that 147 FBI agents had been detailed to the investigation, according to a lawmaker briefed by FBI Director James B. Comey. Two U.S. law enforcement officials have since told The Washington Post that figure is too high. The FBI will not provide an exact figure, but the officials say the number of FBI personnel involved is fewer than 50.

This correction corrects a major March 28 news report by the Post. That wildly erroneous claim—147 agents!—produced excited squeals and insinuations, all over the press, about the obvious seriousness of this ongoing probe.

On the one hand, you just have to laugh at that correction. It leads with a tiny error—it was one email address, not two!

It then moves on to that ginormous groaner, the one which has already caused harm. Stylistically, that clownish correction resembles the old comedy club staple in which the nervous teen-age boy asks the pharmacist for seventeen different innocuous items before he gulps hard and asks for a package of condoms.

(The tired old bit was even featured in the 1971 Jennifer O'Neill vehicle, The Summer of 42.)

On the one hand, that correction is comical, puerile, clownish. On the other hand, it represents the journalism of personal destruction, a culture which has swirled unaccountably through the New York Times and the Washington Post for a good many years now.

During Campaign 2000, there was a phony, behind-the-scenes "independent counsel" probe of Candidate Gore's possible criminality too. That phony, semi-criminal probe produced a lot of negative noise until it finally died away.

That's what these probes are designed to do. These phony probes, with their endless flow of phony facts from anonymous sources, have been a standard part of politics in the age of Clinton/Gore/Clinton.

We the liberals have always sat there and taken it. We keep pretending that we don't know about the pattern that gets played out in these repetitive events.

That's what Jill Abramson is doing when she pretends that the coverage of Candidate Clinton is driven by sexism, rather than by a 24-year-old political war against both Clintons and Gore. A cynic could even say that Kevin Drum is being too soft with this weary assessment of the latest correction of the latest "mistake:"

"Oh well. Close enough for government work, I guess. One of these days, journalists will learn not to rely on Republican sources when they write about the Clintons. One of these days."

Was this really another innocent "mistake" made within the Washington Post? Just like the earlier innocent "mistakes" concerning this latest probe, innocent "mistakes" which were accidentally made on the front page of the New York Times?

After all these error-riddled years, are the Post and the Times really so dumb that they keep making these same old mistakes? We don't know how to answer that question. But we know of no reason to think so.

We do know this:

This sort of thing will continue on. We also know this: Maddow and Hayes won't breathe a word about this innocent mistake, or about the history here.

Dearest darlings, use your heads! Rich careers hang in the balance! Such things simply aren't done!