Campaign watch: Clinton said to show brazen disregard!

TUESDAY, MARCH 15, 2016

Chozick does it again: As she proves again and again, the New York Times' Amy Chozick is an amazingly bad reporter.

Consider the campaign report which appears at the top of today's front page. In the hard-copy Times, it appeared under triple headlines.

The headlines paired Candidate Clinton with Candidate Trump. 2 FRONT-RUNNERS FIND THEIR WORDS CAN BE WEAPONS, the top headline declared.

Here's the way Chozick began her 1300-word report:

CHOZICK (3/15/16): The vulnerabilities of the leading presidential candidates were laid bare on Monday as rivals sought to portray Hillary Clinton as being at odds with the white working class and Donald J. Trump as a misogynist who did not deserve the support of women in the five states that vote on Tuesday.

The chorus of anyone-but-Trump from Republicans reached a roar as voters prepared to go to the polls in Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina and Florida. Our Principles PAC, a group created to try to stop Mr. Trump’s bid, released a scathing one-minute ad that shows women repeating some of his descriptions of women, including “bimbo,” “dog” and “fat pig.”

“This is how Donald Trump talks about our mothers, our sisters, our daughters,” they say.

Mrs. Clinton, who has struggled to connect to white working-class voters in the pivotal Midwestern states, faced intense criticism over comments she made in Columbus, Ohio, on Sunday. “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” she said, in explaining her plan to create clean energy jobs.

America Rising, an anti-Clinton “super PAC,” said the comment showed a “brazen disregard for the men and women who help power America.” A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton said the comments, which she made while discussing her plan to bring jobs back to coal country, were misconstrued.

That is terrible reporting. It's also the only part of the 1300-word report where Chozick discusses the candidates' words being used as weapons, the supposed focus of her front-page report.

In short, Chozick pasted a catchy lede onto a pedestrian election day campaign report. According to her catchy lede, Trump has called women various names. (This claim is widely known to be true.) For her own part, Clinton allegedly displayed "brazen disregard" toward white working-class voters.

According to Chozick, the Clinton campaign said her words were being misconstrued. But good God! In the rest of her 1300 words, Chozick made no attempt to report or explain what they meant.

One candidate had called women names; the other had been brazen! No attempt was made to evaluate the "intense criticism" which had been directed at Clinton by that anti-Clinton PAC.

Just so you'll know, Candidate Clinton's quoted remark was made on Sunday night, near the end of a CNN town hall program. Was she showing a brazen disregard for coal miners who might lose their jobs?

Below, you see Clinton's full comment, delivered in response to a question from CNN's Roland Martin:

MARTIN (3/13/16): Secretary Clinton, I have a voting question, but I need to pick up on what she [the previous questioner] said.

She mentioned poverty. We think about poverty in this country, based upon what the media does, people think the face of poverty is African-American. There are a lot of broke white folks in America.

CLINTON: One hundred percent right.

MARTIN: Broke is broke.

CLINTON: That's right.

MARTIN: Make the case to poor whites who live in Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, who vote Republican, why they should vote for you based upon economic policies, versus voting for a Republican.

CLINTON: Well, first of all, I was happy to carry those states you mentioned, and I carried the white vote in those states too—that voted Democratic. Now I don't want to get carried away here.

Look, we have serious economic problems in many parts of our country. And Roland is absolutely right. Instead of dividing people the way Donald Trump does, let's reunite around policies that will bring jobs and opportunities to all these underserved poor communities.

So for example, I'm the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity, using clean renewable energy as the key, into coal country. Because we're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right, Tim?

And we're going to make it clear that we don't want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives, to turn on our lights and power our factories.

Now, we've got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels. But I don't want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.

So whether it's coal country or Indian country or poor urban areas, there is a lot of poverty in America. We have gone backwards. We were moving in the right direction. In the '90s, more people were lifted out of poverty than any time in recent history.

Because of the terrible economic policies of the Bush administration, President Obama was left with the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and people fell back into poverty because they lost jobs, they lost homes, they lost opportunities and hope.

So I am passionate about this, which is why I have put forward specific plans about how we incentivize more jobs, more investment in poor communities, and put people to work.

MARTIN: Got to go to a commercial. We'll be right back. Final questions with Secretary Hillary Clinton after this short break.

Clinton did say that people in coal country will be losing jobs in the future. That said, was she displaying "brazen disregard" for the people in question?

The whole point of her statement involved her plan "to bring economic opportunity into coal country." She said she doesn't want to forget those people, that we need to "reunite around policies that will bring jobs and opportunities to all these underserved poor communities."

Whatever you think of Clinton's remarks, Chozick's presentation is journalistic malpractice. Taking her text from an anti-Clinton PAC, she quoted one little part of Clinton's statement, making no attempt to provide the overall context.

She reported that the Clinton campaign said the quote was misleading. She never bothered providing the context which would have explained what they meant.

In the remaining thousand words of her report, she never returned to the "words as weapons" theme which she used for her lede. She could have provided further context, but she chose to wander off into a pedestrian election day campaign report.

Chozick is a journalistic nightmare. (So is her editor, assuming that some such person exists.) It isn't that her work isn't good. Routinely, she stages front-page gong-shows in ways we've never seen.

Who in the world is Amy Chozick and why did the New York Times hire her? Based on her aggressively promoted life story, she seems to be a gruesome cross between Midnight Cowboy and Working Girl.

Based upon her self-promoted life story, she got off the bus in New York City and began promoting herself. Because her work is horrifically bad, the New York Times apparently saw that she had to be theirs.

The New York Times is empty, intellectually broken. Chozick was the perfect hire, given the track they're on.