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.
Or, as the AP put it:
We focused on Mrs. Clinton’s meetings and calls involving those people outside her duties as secretary of state whom she chose to include in her busy schedule.
The problem is this proposition is in no sense true, and anyone reporting on the secretary of state for any reason would know that. The United States secretary of state is far from utterly obligated to follow through on every request for a meeting with officials from ours or any other government. Conversely, the secretary of state is frequently required to meet with private citizens. This is particularly true when those citizens are leaders of organizations such as think tanks, professional groups, and non-governmental organizations.
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.
Stephen Braun and Eileen Sullivan, the two Associated Press reporters who put their bylines on the original article, didn’t commit bad journalism. They engaged in fundamental dishonesty. Paul Colford, the Vice President and Director of Media Relations, who signed off on the retraction of the original tweet, but who continued the deception around the means of generating that headline, furthered that dishonesty.
Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll, who admitted that the original tweet was inaccurate but chose to leave it in place, didn’t make an error and didn’t show poor judgment. She presided over journalistic misconduct.
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.
It had to be frustrating, especially for Braun and Sullivan, who had been at the center of the endless-attention-generating email server story. So the Associated Press decided that “no story,” was not the story they would tell.
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 if it still seems coincidental that 85 of the people Hillary Clinton met with over this period were contributors at some level to the Clinton Foundation, consider this: The Associated Press refused to provide a list of these 85. They’ve provided a handful of names, but the bulk of the list is a mystery. We know there were 85 meetings—or we think we do—only because the Associated Press says there were 85 meetings. But it refuses to show its work.
Even in the few names that have been provided, there’s a huge problem.
More than half the people outside the government who met with Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state gave money — either personally or through companies or groups — to the Clinton Foundation. It's an extraordinary proportion indicating her possible ethics challenges if elected president.
Not only does that paragraph go to an unfathomable conclusion—that the tiny group of meetings examined from nothing more than names on a ledger indicate “possible ethics challenges” for a Clinton presidency, there’s a fundamental flaw associated with the analysis embedded in the first sentence. Several of the names we have been provided gave not a dime to the Clinton Foundation. Ever. However, they were involved with “companies or groups” which did.
In stretching the meaning of donor to include employees or members of groups, the Associated Press has engaged in a six-degrees-of-Hillary-Clinton tactic that makes the value of even the few names we’ve been given questionable. How far did they extend this process to generate the whole set of 85? We don’t know. Because they won’t share their data. Donald Trump might have a secret plan for ISIS, but the Associated Press has secret data. If the data were as provocative as the Associated Press “big story” asserted, why did the AP refuse to make the basic data public, even at the request of the Clinton campaign?
In creating this story out of thin air and a desire to dominate another news cycle, the Associated Press fed a media all-too-ready for the “next Clinton scandal.” They provided talking points that Donald Trump has used in the intervening weeks. They contributed to an impression that Hillary Clinton is biased and untrustworthy. They were a distinct factor in driving down the public impression of Clinton’s honesty.
They directly affected the polling over the past two weeks and fed a narrative that continues to eat into the public perception of Hillary Clinton as a candidate. They also damaged the work of a foundation that directly aids millions of people around the world.
And they did it through deliberate deception. Through misstatement. Through a lie.
As a side effect of this whole affair, they’ve also devalued the reputation of an organization that’s been at the heart of American journalism for 170 years, merely to ride a dishonest narrative to the front of a fleeting news cycle.
I hope it was worth it.