In a piece just published by Media Matters, Alexandrea Boguhn and Matt Gertz are reporting that newly obtained documents undermine the latest round of gossip at the New York Times about Hillary Clinton’s email..
As Media Matters notes in its critique, the Times veered away from responsible journalism, and it returned to the sloppy, incomplete reporting featured in stories it printed about Clinton 6 weeks ago. It must sell papers.
The Times reported that Darrel Issa “directly asked" Clinton about her personal email account over two years ago. In reality, the House Oversight Committee sent a written inquiry to all 18 Cabinet officials as part of a broad fishing expedition investigation that had nothing to do with Clinton. It was about Solyndra.
Media Matters linked a copy of the inquiry letter that was sent and it's worth a look. In the first paragraph, it's obvious that Issa, and everyone else, already knew two years ago that agency officials throughout the federal government were using personal email accounts.
The Times also reported that Clinton failed to reply to the inquiry, and that the State Department answered, instead, after a delay of several months, but “ it ignored the question and provided no response.” And Clinton had left the State Department by that time, too.
Media Matters obtained the responses from two other agencies: the Department of Labor (DOL) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Their replies to the House Oversight inquiry were similar to the reply sent by the State Department. The Department of Labor was slower to respond than the State Department, by a month.
the Times has discovered that Cabinet agencies don't always respond to congressional inquiries quickly and in full. |
By omitting context, the Times left it up to the imagination of readers to fill in the missing details. The story suggests unspecified misdeeds with avoidant behavior to evade the consequences. Other media outlets picked up the story and amplified it with more explicit language.
This is, perhaps, nothing more than commerce and competition for profits. It could be sophisticated modern propaganda, too.