The year 2016 was not exactly a banner year for the American press. In the ten days before the election, the New York Times first devoted every single column of their front page to a letter whose entire content was that there might possibly be some emails on a computer the FBI had not yet examined. Two days later, the Times buried the Trump–Russia story on an interior page with the assurance of anonymous sources that there was no ongoing investigation. The pair of articles not only demonstrates amazingly poor journalistic insight, but showcases the New York Times knee-jerk tendency to kick a Clinton at every opportunity.
However, that was not the worst, most egregious example of pure journalist malpractice that happened during the election. That “honor” belongs to the Associated Press.
On August 23, the Associated Press pushed out a tweet on a hot story …
BREAKING: AP analysis: More than half those who met Clinton as Cabinet secretary gave money to Clinton Foundation.
— @ap
That headline didn’t just appear on innumerable broadcasts, papers, blogs, and Facebook posts, it served to solidify an idea that the right had been pressing for a long time—that Hillary Clinton’s charitable activities, which helped literally millions, were somehow worse than Donald Trump’s self-serving tax dodge. Somehow the Clinton Foundation ended up being the subject of a thousand distorted, poorly researched articles, while David Fahrenthold picked up a Pulitzer for the kind of simple, dogged reporting that eluded the rest of the media. Fahrenthold, deservedly, got the award, but the insta-scandal headlines dominated the news. And none was worse than the story by AP reporters Stephen Braun and Eileen Sullivan.
That article—now posted under a revised headline—demonstrates an amazing willingness to distort information in order to generate a story that wasn’t there, an ongoing lack of transparency, and a near criminal dishonesty.
The thrust of the AP story was that those who wanted a meeting with Hillary Clinton during her term as secretary of state should start by making a donation to her foundation, a claim it boiled into what appeared to be a simple statistical analysis.
At least 85 of 154 people from private interests who met or had phone conversations scheduled with Clinton while she led the State Department donated to her family charity or pledged commitments to its international programs, according to a review of State Department calendars released so far to The Associated Press.
But those apparently precise numbers ignored the facts that:
- The schedules that Braun and Sullivan had were incomplete, with detailed information representing only a portion of Hillary Clinton’s time in office.
- The data was manipulated, throwing out any meeting they judged as having to do with someone who was part of the US government or a representative of a foreign government.
- To find enough “donors” to generate the headline, they extended the list beyond direct donors to include employees of companies or charities that had donated.
If all of Hillary Clinton’s meetings were counted, or only direct donors were counted, then it would have become obvious that donors to the Clinton Foundation represented only a small fraction of those who visited her at the State Department—which would have made for a much less impressive headline.
Under criticism, the AP issued a defense of the article on August 24.
AP has been transparent in how it has reported this story. It focused on Mrs. Clinton’s meetings and calls involving people outside government who were not federal employees or foreign diplomats, because meeting with U.S. or foreign government officials would inherently have been part of her job as secretary of state.
The problem with this definition of the job of the secretary of state is that it’s utterly ridiculous. There is nothing in the role that suggests the secretary need meet with every foreign diplomat who makes a request. The limits to which this silliness was raised can be seen who the report considered “optional.”
A Nobel Prize winning economist and head of an international charity, the head of group that’s been working to bring peace to the Middle East for three decades, and an executive from a charitable organization dedicated to fighting AIDS.
Those aren’t just random selections from the list. Those are the examples provided by the Associated Press as people who were not part of Hillary Clinton’s job as secretary of state.
Two weeks later the Associated Press deleted the original tweet. But still maintained the idea that there was some validity in their report.
The tweet omitted the important distinction between discretionary meetings and official meetings.
Though, of course, the tweet continued to be cited in other articles and used by the Trump campaign.
As he has several times recently, Mike Pence repeated a false claim that the Associated Press found that more than half of the individual meetings that she gave while Secretary of State were with major donors to the Clinton Foundation.
The idea that the secretary of state must agree to meet with an obscure official, but has complete discretion in meeting with US business leaders and those in charge of large international charities isn’t just a massive misrepresentation of the position, it’s a deliberate distortion. It’s a definition that was generated to justify the AP’s selective use of data in order to create a story that was not there.
But the AP’s defense of the article isn’t completely without merit, because it reveals one critical nugget of truth.
This reporting was done by the same AP investigative team that discovered Mrs. Clinton’s private email server and traced it to her basement in Chappaqua, New York, and whose reporting last week resulted in the resignation of Donald Trump’s top campaign strategist.
What it shows is an AP “investigative team” that had already been successful in sensationalizing one area of the Clinton campaign and a need for a new story—even if it had to be knitted from a whole cloth.
The best sign that the AP was not only wrong, but knows that it’s wrong? From almost the moment that the article appeared, the Associated Press has refused to turn over the data used in making the “calculations.” Though limited amounts of information were provided in the original article and in followups, they repeatedly insisted that while the investigation “relied on publicly available data” they would not reveal the complete list of meetings that were included and those that were struck.
At the same time, David Fahrenthold was openly, methodically working through a list of items that he kept not just in public view, but invited the public to join him in analyzing that data.
The Associated Press kept their information hidden, rushed through the analysis, built a shaky case based on a deliberate mis-reading, and refused to share the information in a way that allowed anyone else to check their results.
A year later, that’s why Fahrenthold has the Pulitzer, and the AP is guilty of egregious misconduct.
Note: To my knowledge, the Associated Press has still refused to provide the complete list of data used in their original article.