In a statement that is mindblowing for its shameless ethics ignorance, Slate editor Josh Voorhees wrote,
“The latest batch of State Department emails from Hillary Clinton’s tenure, released Tuesday, further highlights the occasionally overlapping interests between the agency and the Clinton Foundation. The messages, which don’t directly involve the Democratic nominee herself, aren’t going to overshadow Donald Trump’s ongoing self-immolation—nor should they—but they are worth a closer look.”
“Nor should they?”
Nor should they?
By what possible set of warped values could the latest inanity from a Presidential candidate who constantly says silly, inarticulate and ultimately meaningless things the second they pop into what we generously call “his brain,” be more worthy of public attention than revelations that the other candidate for President used her position in the State Department for the enrichment of herself and her family?
The former is a well-established idiot free-associator idiotically free-associating with the same results he always gets. Why is this news? It is only news because the news media, knowing well that Trump just utters jokes, ad-libs, random observations, musings, insults and all sorts of other things that adults never say in public because his confused and disoriented fans enjoy them, intentionally treats them as serious statements of a serious person, when they know very well he is not. The latest of these is the Trump assertion that Obama is “literally” the “founder of ISIS.” It is as newsworthy as if Trump said “Obama is literally a tree frog.” OK, everyone knows this isn’t true, and that Trump is a babbling fool. Got it. Next? Yet this non-story gets absurd attention: like at ABC News, The National Memo, Business Insider, Fox News Insider, Politicus USA, Washington Post, Raw Story, The New Civil Rights Movement, Daily Kos, The Times of Israel, CBS New York, RT, Balloon Juice, New York Magazine, Guardian, Independent Journal Review, Mother Jones, NBC News,and Mediaite.
Before that, it was media hysteria over Trump’s bizarre “Second Amendment people” crack being a crime, which Popehat neatly debunks here. Ken White’s opening statement is also enlightening: “Donald Trump, against all advice and rumors of pivot, will continue to be Donald Trump.”
Exactly. Which means his continuing to say stuff that mature and responsible people don’t say is not legitimate front page news.
Ah, but it provides an excuse not to explain to the public how stunningly corrupt Hillary is and has been. That is the objective, and an biased and unethical objective it is.
Judicial Watch released many emails that were deleted improperly by the Clinton staff including communications indicating special assistance for Clinton Foundation donors at the State Department, with one of them involving a convicted money launderer. In one 2009 email exchange, Doug Band, an executive at the Clinton Foundation, contacted top Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, asking them to put Gilbert Chagoury, a Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire who had donated millions to the foundation, in touch with the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon. Abedin replied that she’d make the connection. “I’m sure he knows him,” she wrote in reference to Jeffrey Feltman, who was the ambassador to Lebanon at the time. “I’ll talk to jeff.” Band then responded by urging Abedin to call the ambassador herself ASAP.
In a separate exchange several days earlier, Band asked for something his subject line described as “a favor.” Band seems to have been passing along a note from someone who had recently traveled to Haiti on a Clinton Foundation trip and was subsequently looking for a job at the State Department. “Important to take care of [redacted],” Band wrote. Abedin replied: “We have all had him on our radar” and “Personnel has been sending him options.”
Writes Voorhees:
“The Chagoury email thread gives the impression that a big-dollar donation to the Clinton Foundation got you a State Department–themed perk or two, but there’s no smoking gun proving that actually happened.”
We’re not trying to get a jury conviction, though: we’re trying to get a sense of how Clinton operates, and this strongly suggests that she takes bribes, and has used her position for family’s enrichment. This suspicion is not news either, but it is further evidence of what many observers have concluded. Uh, hello? Am I going crazy? Isn’t this kind of screaming conflict of interest and likely influence peddling a big deal? You know, news? As in “more important than an idiot again showing he’s an idiot?”
Not to Voorhees, who says,
And, of course, nothing in these emails is nearly as troubling as your run-of-the-mill Trump policy proposal or stump speech.
Those Trump speeches are words, Josh. Words that mean even less than most words. They are just barely communications. Influence peddling is conduct. Conduct is always more important than words. In addition to the quid pro quo, the new e-mails add more proof that when Hillary insisted that the more than 30,000 deleted emails were entirely and clearly personal in nature, she was lying. These e-mails were among them. They are not personal. They show misconduct, and that’s why they were deleted.
I don’t mean to be picking on Professor Turley, but his reluctance to come right out and say what he means gets annoying after a while. On this topic he writes:
“The relative lack of coverage on both the proof of the improper deletion of such emails and the pay-for-play concerns is astonishing — and magnify concerns that mainstream media has been giving such controversies minimal coverage.”
Oh, there are concerns about the news media perhaps engaging in biased coverage, are there?
The news media is engaging in biased coverage, and the way it is doing it misleads the public about what is most important in leadership. To answer the question in the title of the post, I do think that journalists are so biased and ethically confused that they really believe that Clinton’s corruption is less important—after all, everybody does it, it’s for a good cause, no harm no foul, there are worst things and the ends justify the means—than the politically incorrect and silly things Donald Trump says.
Ethics Alarms 
How did you avoid a Kaboom?
Christoper Hitchens was on to this graft…I mean “charity” back in 2009: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2009/01/more_than_a_good_feeling.html
I have concluded from this coverage that it may be impossible for the GOP to ever win the White House again. Then again, maybe they deserve it, having run Trump.
This: “[T]hey deserve it, having run Trump.”
Idiots can sometimes lead you to water.
View at Medium.com
Did you read the comments on the Slate article?
No. Should I?
makes me wanna cry… all of this… fools parade. 😦
But didn’t you say earlier on this blog that there was an ethical duty to ensure Donald Trump was not elected president?
The media is acting ethically, per your own posts.
I’m in a bad mood, and this is a dickish comment. I consistently advocate being unbiased and objective regarding both candidates, and what the media is doing is the opposite of that. Voting, you see—JERK—is a legal and ethical act. Journalists hiding and misrepresenting the news so the public doesn’t have enough valid information to make their own decision isn’t. This is an ethics blog. In no way are journalists doing what I advocate here.
Is this too complex for you? Gee, I’m sorry. Did the last Times essay confuse you? I am presenting as much objective analysis of both candidates character and corruption as I can., being as fair as I can. Or perhaps you’ve missed all of the posts calling the media and Democrats on absurd attacks on Trump?
I know that Trmnp makes his supporters stupid, but for god’s sake, fight it, man!
The evidence has piled up so much that almost anybody should be able to see it: the American presidential selection system is rigged, corrupt and horribly broken.
But the rigging is maybe not exactly what we think it is. It is not so subtle collusion between big media, big money, big government, academia, the political parties, and foreign interests… all working together to create an illusion that the American people may actually have some small say in selecting the president.
What a bad joke that has turned out to be.
This is the system that resulted in two of the most horribly unsuitable candidates being nominated by the two major political parties, leaving the electorate with the “choice” of a minimally competent but dishonest, corrupt and unethical candidate, or the other blathering idiot.
Great choice!