What DOES Oprah see in this woman…
CBS This Morning co-host Gayle King demonstrated on Thursday an unacceptable mindset for a broadcast journalist as we get deeper into the 2016 Presidential campaign, which is to say bias, ignorance, and a complete lack of awareness that biased and ignorant isn’t a wonderful way to go through life.
While discussing the State Department’s Inspector General’s report that exposed the full extent of Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, King blithely said, to Face the Nation’s John Dickerson:
“So John, put it in perspective. How big a deal is this really? I was at an event last night, and both Democrats and Republicans were quoting Bernie Sanders saying, ‘I’m sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails’…so how big a deal is it?”
The disgrace is that any alleged journalist could say something this stupid and damning on live TV without a bag over her head. A fair translation of the statement is “I am ignorant of technology, the duties of executive leadership and ethics: I see nothing disqualifying about lying, or a Secretary of State intentionally placing the nation’s security at risk for her own personal benefit. I am a Democrat and I only hang around with people who think like me.”
How can a responsible network leave it to people this clueless, and clueless about how clueless they are, to report the news? How can someone this insular and foolish be trusted…well, to come in out of the rain? How can a responsible citizen watch any news show that has so little respect for its viewers as to hire and pay someone so blithely incompetent?
To his credit, Dickerson’s answer was not too terrible, though it would have been much enhanced by the interjection of “you cretin” somewhere:
“Is this going to improve anybody’s wages? Is this going to help their kid get into a college and not be full of debt for the rest of their life? No, but it’s about judgment and character. And we look at our presidents that way. And the challenge for Secretary Clinton is in the answers, are they going to raise new questions? In other words, when she says it was allowed and it was fine and I’ve been transparent and then you have an Inspector General, not just a political opponent, but an Inspector General saying the opposite thing, people are getting a fresh, real time test of whether the candidate is shooting straight with them, and that’s a challenge for any candidate.”
Ethics Alarms 
On the FOIA side of this, one tack is to remind Clinton apologists that FOIA is a Democratic law, passed by a mid – sixties Congress that was just about 2/3 Democratic in each house, and signed by Democratic President Johnson. If conspiracy to circumvent the law is no big deal, then why was the law passed? Isn’t it hypocritical for Democrats to pass the law, treat it as a pillar of open government, and then act like it doesn’t exist when it interferes with their election plans.
Excellent point. Why isn’t more attention being paid to the FOIA side of this? A mystery to me as well.
I think this is a fair summary.
. Underfunded, understaffed offices responsible for compliance didn’t do a great job, leading to potential mistakes by many senior State officials who were in office long before Clinton; poorly written rules allowed for the use of personal email accounts; the experts were fully aware of the arrangements but raised no concerns to her or her staff; documents were preserved but not in the precise way dictated by the rules.
I consider this scandalous, because it’s a systemic problem, with no indication that the situation has improved since. While “the buck stops here” at some point you have to rely on subordinates rather than reading through an arcane and contradictory 16 volumes of rules concerning e-mail protocols.
Not a fair summary, ZB. She and her minions, at her direction, went out of their way to consciously circumvent the protocols. Approvals were not sought. How can you say it was the system that was at fault when she meticulously subverted the system?
This is the crux of my disagreement with Beth.
From an article in The Hill: By exclusively using a personal email address routed through a private server, Clinton circumvented policies designed to follow federal records laws and might have jeopardized official secrets, the agency wrote in the report.
Clinton never requested permission to use the personal server, which was located at her New York home, and it “would not” have been approved, in part, because of “the security risks in doing so,” the watchdog agency wrote.
Zoe: you are either lying or willfully ignorant of the contents of the OIG report, which is the same as lying. There are scores Of State employees who should lose their security clearances and be demoted, fired, or prosecuted, but their “mistake” consisted of meekly submitting to the lawless behavior of a superior who intentionally went rogue and endangered national security.
Since when is she a JOURNALIST??? Doesn’t that require something like training? Does she qualify as a talking head or host?
What IS King, exactly, other than Oprah’s (cough) gal pal?
I find most news stations are biased and especially CBS anchor Gayle King. Someone should give her some feedback regarding her whine and the personal judgments she communicated when reporting the news. We aren’t watching for Gayle King to report her personal likes and dislikes.