POLITICS EXCLUSIVE: Glaring Inaccuracies in NBC's Hillary Clinton FBI Reporting

[Skidmore]

http://thedailybanter.com/2016/09/glaring-inaccuracies-in-nbcs-hillary-clinton-fbi-reporting/

In the light of a highly critical and distorted segment covering the release of the FBI's Hillary Clinton investigation notes on Sunday's Meet the Press, NBC News and Chuck Todd must answer questions about glaring inaccuracies and potential anti-Clinton bias in their coverage.

As the 2016 presidential election turns into its final two months, certain media narratives have been set. Those media narratives have the power and potential to have a substantial effect on the outcome of the election, yet little attention seems to be paid on whether or not those narratives stand up to real scrutiny.

On the side of Republican nominee Donald Trump, the narratives are many and often disparate; depending on the media source, he is either a charlatan and demagogue with no chance of winning or a fabulous builder and businessman whose constituency is waiting to sweep him to victory. When it comes to Democrat Hillary Clinton, the narrative is much more consistent. The media highlights her "trust deficit" with voters and views every action -- or lack thereof in the case of press conferences -- through a filter of this perpetual distrust. As noted by a handful in the media, this "trust issue" is something that the media has pinned on Hillary Clinton since before she even became First Lady, accepting the work of political propagandists as true unless expressly disproven. Just these past couple of weeks, we've seen sloppy or worse reporting and social media posts from the AP and even the venerable New York Times, a paper with whom both Clintons have had brushes in the past. Vox reporter Jonathan Allen identified what he termed as the media's Clinton rules, or a set of near-universal actions by media as it relates to the Clintons, and Hillary in particular. Among these is Clinton rule number 3, "The media assumes that Clinton is acting in bad faith until there's hard evidence otherwise."


In the case of Meet the Press, it appears that rule 3 has an addendum: "When no evidence of bad faith exists, facts will be distorted or fabricated in order to create such appearance." Todd presented MTP's "top takeaways" from the FBI report: ..more