At the vice presidential debate Tuesday night, Mike Pence attacked the Clinton Foundation using one very special source.
PENCE: ... we found, thanks to the good work of the Associated Press, that more than half her private meetings when she was secretary of state were given to major donors of the Clinton Foundation.
Back on August 23, the Associated Press put out a tweet that got a huge amount of press attention.
BREAKING: AP analysis: More than half those who met Clinton as Cabinet secretary gave money to Clinton Foundation.
The trouble was … it wasn’t true. The tweet itself and the headline on the associated article completely disagreed with the contents. And the contents themselves went well past simply being wrong, and into the realm of willful distortion and fundamental dishonesty.
For two weeks, the Associated Press parked on a tweet and story pushing the idea that Hillary Clinton had engaged in favoritism toward people who had made donations to the Clinton Foundation. To get there, the AP started with a substantially incomplete data set covering only a portion of Clinton’s time as secretary of state. When this data didn’t tell the story they wanted, they sliced it down. And when the results still didn’t generate the numbers they wanted, they sliced it again. Ultimately, they generated a backstory to justify their actions—the secretary of state is always obligated to meet with representatives of other nations or government workers, but the secretary of state is never obligated to meet with people who fall outside these sets.
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It was beyond slipshod. It was journalistic misconduct. And the Associated Press still hasn’t dealt with the core problem.
Two weeks after the fact, Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll, admitted the original tweet was inaccurate, but she chose to leave it in place. Why didn’t the Associated Press at least adjust this information so that it aligned with the content of their article? Because by that time the tweet, and its implications, had become the story. The article, whose contents were infinitely weaker than what the headline presented, came off a very poor second.
The truth is that the Associated Press examined the data and found, quite simply, that donors to the Clinton Foundation made up a very small percentage of visitors to Hillary Clinton's office as secretary of state. Though they worked for an extended period to obtain records, dug through disorganized information to create searchable data, and spent days picking through the resulting information, in the end they found … nothing. They found no preferential treatment. No unethical contact. Not a hint of services rendered. Nothing. There was no story there.
What the Associated Press actually found was that Hillary Clinton was clean. There was not the slightest hint of “pay-for-play” or any other type of scandal. But that wasn’t good enough. So they set out, with journalistic malice aforethought, to alter the data.
They chose to eliminate more than 1,700 meetings from the data, and to pretend that a tiny group of 85 meetings held with contributors to the Clinton Foundation constituted some sort of “majority” of “discretionary” meetings, even if that took treating as discretionary meetings with people who had met with previous secretary of states, people who were involved in projects funded by the State Department, and people heading up groups directly working to provide aid to refugees. In no universe were these meetings “discretionary” except that generated for the purpose of making a story.
And even then, they didn’t actually turn up 85 people who were donors to the Clinton Foundation. To reach that number, they had to include people who worked at other foundations that had some business with the Clinton Foundation. They even included people who worked at companies if that company had made a contribution to the Clinton Foundation.
So, by throwing out 97 percent of meetings, then being extremely generous with the term “donor,” the AP generated the headline that they wanted.
And then, after they published their article claiming those 85 meetings that met their criteria, the AP refused to release either the raw or the filtered data.
The Associated Press declined on Wednesday to disclose the list of 85 people who it reportedly identified as having donated as much as $156 million to the foundation.
“We are still reporting on them ― cross-referencing information and so on,” AP Director of Media Relations Paul Colford told HuffPost, adding that the news organization is “not done with the names yet.”
Cross-referencing apparently takes some time. Daily Kos attempted to obtain this information from AP this week, but did not receive a response.
More than a month after the initial report, and weeks after the Associated Press was forced to admit that their click-bait headline was false, they still have not revealed the original data, detailed their work in striking thousands of names off the original list of meetings, or provided the 85 names which were used in making unwarranted accusations at Hillary Clinton. The fundamental dishonesty of the original report still stands. This is not news reporting.
The whole concept that one set of meetings were obligatory and the other voluntary is a fiction. It is a not-even-paper-thin defense of a process that goes beyond confirmation bias. This wasn’t accidentally stumbling into a set of values that reinforced an existing narrative. This is an instance of creating those numbers through direct and obvious manipulation.
Contrast AP’s hidden data, self-selection and rush to press with the way David Fahrenthold has worked through the data available on the Trump Foundation. Farenthold has been open about his process, up front with his data, transparent on every step. Unlike the AP, he hasn’t hurried into stories with click-bait headlines, and as a result his work has produced a steady stream of accurate, verifiable articles that are casting light on not just the Trump Foundation, but Trump.
One of these organizations deserves praise and recognition for their work. One deserves shame.