We can all finally stop worrying about Hillary Clintons emails.

Last week, Congress received a brief, nine-page report from the State Department, which summarizes the departments investigation into Hillary Clintons use of a personal email account to conduct work business while she was secretary of state. The report can be fairly summarized in two sentences: She shouldnt have done that. But it wasnt that big of a deal.

Thus, America finally has closure on a minor scandal that many of the nations most powerful and influential news editors treated as if it were the most important issue facing voters in the 2016 election. In just six days, according to an analysis of 2016 coverage published in the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), the New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clintons emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election. And the Times was hardly alone in this regard.

By contrast, the Timess piece on the State Department report concluding that Her Emails werent actually that big of a deal ran on page A16 in print. (It was featured somewhat more prominently on the Timess online homepage.) Similarly, data provided to Vox by the liberal group Media Matters indicates that television news all three major cable networks plus all three broadcast stations spent a total of less than 56 minutes combined on the new State Department report.

The State Departments report reaches two broad conclusions. Clintons use of a private email system to conduct official business added an increased degree of risk that classified information would be compromised. But there was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.

In 2016, the State Departments inspector general also determined that Clintons Republican predecessors, Secretaries Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, also received classified information on their personal email accounts.

So Clinton committed the same mistake committed by her predecessors Powell reportedly advised Clinton to use a personal email account for non-classified communications shortly after Clinton became secretary and the State Departments report found no systemic mishandling of information.

Clintons use of private email was the sort of minor scandal that the public deserved to be informed about at some point during the 2016 election after which the news cycle could move on to other, more important stories. But that sure as hell wasnt how it was covered. Indeed, it is likely that Donald Trump is president today in part because of the presss obsession with this very small story.

Months after the 2016 election, a team of researchers at Harvards Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society set out to quantify which issues received coverage and which issues were ignored by major media outlets during that election. To do so, they read thousands of campaign-related articles in several major outlets, and counted how many sentences were devoted to various issues. The results are striking.

As CJR later summarized this research, the Berkman Klein Center found roughly four times as many Clinton-related sentences that described scandals as opposed to policies, whereas Trump-related sentences were one-and-a-half times as likely to be about policy as scandal. Indeed, emails so dominated coverage that the various Clinton-related email scandalsher use of a private email server while secretary of state, as well as the DNC and John Podesta hacksaccounted for more sentences than all of Trumps scandals combined (65,000 vs. 40,000) and more than twice as many as were devoted to all of her policy positions.

Meanwhile, CJR researchers Duncan J. Watts and David M. Rothschild did a deep dive into how the New York Times covered 2016, and their findings are just as stark. Of the 1,433 articles that mentioned Trump or Clinton, during the last 69 days of the 2016 campaign, 291 were devoted to scandals or other personal matters while only 70 mentioned policy, and of these only 60 mentioned any details of either candidates positions.

One-hundred fifty of these New York Times articles, moreover, appeared on the papers front page. Of these, only 16 discussed policy in any way, of which six had no details, four provided details on Trumps policy only, one on Clintons policy only, and five made some comparison between the two candidates policies. By contrast, the Times ran 10 front-page articles on Clintons emails in just six days, between October 29 and November 3.

The overarching impression created by this reporting, in other words, was that the emails were more important than all of the policy questions facing voters in 2016 questions like whether millions of Americans would lose health care, whether the United States would bar immigrants because of their religion, and who would control the Supreme Court.

We cannot know with certainty what would have happened if news outlets did not fixate on this story during 2016. But as Tina Nguyen wrote in Vanity Fair, you could fit all the voters who cost Clinton the election in a mid-sized football stadium. As FiveThirtyEights Nate Silver wrote in 2017, Hillary Clinton would probably be president if FBI Director James Comey had not sent a letter to Congress on Oct. 28 that reinvigorated the emails story shortly before the election.

We do know, moreover, that the obsessive coverage of Clintons emails shaped how voters perceived the 2016 race. In September 2016, Gallup asked voters what they recalled hearing about the two major presidential candidates. The word cloud for Trump primarily shows a mixture of immigration policy and generic campaign terms.

Meanwhile, Clintons word cloud speaks for itself.

The press obsession with government IT security, moreover, appears to be a passing fad that ended the moment Clinton lost her shot at the White House. News broke last November, for example, that First Daughter and presidential aide Ivanka Trump sent hundreds of emails last year to White House aides, Cabinet officials and her assistants using a personal account, many of them in violation of federal records rules. Yet this story received only a fraction of the coverage that Clintons emails received.

Setting aside the media mania over Clintons emails, there is a very important story about classified email security at the State Department that journalists could have told in 2016. Broadly speaking, the federal governments processes regarding how classified information should be handled are designed with low and mid-level personnel in mind, and are ill-suited for the issues facing very senior diplomats.

As of October of 2015, 4.3 million people have security clearances from the United States government. This includes some very low-level personnel who have access to extraordinarily sensitive information. Think of Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who leaked hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables, battlefield reports, and other classified documents when she was a junior enlisted soldier.

Because there is such a high risk that someone could leak damaging national security information, the protocols for handling such information are often very strict, and the penalties for violating these protocols can be quite high. The fact that so many people must comply with these protocols also fed a perception that Clinton refused to obey rules that rank-and-file government employees must follow religiously.

But the fact is that the secretary of state be it Clinton, Rice, or Powell is very different from a low-ranking soldier like Manning. The rigid protocols that we impose on most people with security clearances do not always make sense for senior diplomats.

As Suzanne Nossel, a former deputy assistant secretary of state under Clinton, explained in a 2015 piece in Foreign Policy, neither then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton nor her aides had a classified smartphone. Typically, State Department officials with access to classified information will have one email address for ordinary communications and another for classified communications (Clinton used her personal address as her address for ordinary communications). But, to access the classified address, an official must be at a special computer set up to access classified information. Because high-level officials are not always near such a computer, an email sent to a classified address may not be seen for hours or even days.

A senior diplomat might need the secretary to tell her how to vote on a particular United Nations resolution, for example. But if that diplomat follows proper protocol and queries the secretary over the classified email system, the secretary may not see the email until the vote has already taken place.

Senior diplomats, in Nossels words, must make tough choices about the trade-off between security and the need for timely transmission of vital information. And in the heat of an ongoing negotiation or an impending crisis, it is not always clear that following rigid protocols is in the best interests of the nation.

Clinton was, of course, the head of the State Department, so she fairly can be criticized for not implementing new processes that could address these concerns. There is a nuanced conversation to be had about how the State Department should balance concerns about information security with senior diplomats need to convey information quickly. News outlets could have used the controversy over Clintons emails as a jumping-off point to spark this conversation. Perhaps this kind of coverage could have pushed the department to implement needed reforms.

Instead, we got a circus where every new twist in the emails saga received big headlines and overwhelming coverage. We got an election cycle where Hillary Clintons IT practices received more coverage than her opponent bragging about how he grabs women by the pussy without their consent.

And now we have an appropriate bookend for this media-made scandal: a State Department report that finds it was no big deal in the end, published on page A16 of the New York Times.

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Hillary Clinton: the shameful conclusion to the But Her Emails debacle - Vox.com

22 October 2019

In a full-page editorial in its Sunday edition, the New York Times engaged in a vicious anti-Chinese rant, warning of a dangerous and growing threat by the aggressive Communist state.

The editorial presented the United States in a twilight struggle against Chinese cultural imperialism, which was aiming to stifle this nations core values.

This hysterical languagecalling China dangerous, aggressive and a threathas all the hallmarks of the racist myth of the yellow peril used to justify the colonial subjugation of Asia by the European and American imperialist powers.

China, the Times wrote, is seeking to control not just what is said in China but what is said about China, too. It asserted that Americas commitment to human rights, including the freedom of expression faces an especially stern test.

The Times did not seek to explain what commitment to human rights is shown by US imperialism. Is it the commitment to human rights that led the US to rape, torture, or murder hundreds of thousands of people across Iraq, from the dungeons of Abu Ghraib, to Fallujah and Sadr City? Or to commit massacres all over the world, from My Lai in Vietnam to the Kunduz hospital attack in Afghanistan?

The Obama administration murdered American citizens with drone missiles. The Trump administration, expanding on the policies of the Democrats, separates thousands of immigrant families and presides over what the UN characterizes as child torture. The American government imprisons whistleblower Chelsea Manning and is seeking to inflict a life sentence, or worse, on WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange for exposing war crimes.

US imperialism claims the prerogative not just to meddle in the affairs of other countries, but to overthrow any elected government that it views as an obstacle to its interests. According to one study reported in the Washington Post, the US tried to change other nations governments 72 times between 1947 and 1989. Of those, 26 of the United States covert operations successfully brought a US-backed government to power.

No country comes close to the United States in the vast resources it devotes to propaganda and placing politicians, academics, and journalists on the payroll of its intelligence agencies.

In his history of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), The Mighty Wurlitzer, Hugh Wilford noted:

High-ranking officials in the American labor movement, it emerged, had worked clandestinely with the [CIA] to spread the principles of free trade unionism around the world. Anticommunist intellectuals, writers, and artists were the recipients of secret government largesse... University professors, journalists, aid workers, missionaries, civil rights activists all had belonged to the CIAs covert network of front operations.

And then there were the hundreds of journalists revealed to be on the CIA payroll. Wilford wrote:

Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, was a good friend of [Central Intelligence Agency Director] Allen Dulles and signed a secrecy agreement with the Agency... Under the terms of this arrangement, the Times provided at least ten CIA officers with cover as reporters or clerical staff in its foreign bureaus, while genuine employees of the paper were encouraged to pass on information to the Agency.

The New York Times epitomizes the eradication of any distinction between news and state propaganda. In his recent memoir, whistleblower Edward Snowden recalls seeing stories that appeared in the CIAs internal news service show up, several days later, in the pages of the American newspapers, almost unchanged with additional references to unnamed intelligence sources.

The threat to American democracy comes not from without, but from within. The New York Times, in its endless demands for censorship and conformity with the values of the state, is one of the principal instigators of that threat.

American companies, the Times declared on Sunday, must affirm the Americanconsensus against the Chinese Communist Partys position. It accused Disney and Comcast of appeasement, and of advocating for the Chinese Communist Partys position, and against the Americanconsensus.

In particular, the Times took issue with a scene in the DreamWorks childrens film, Abominable, that, it claimed, inaccurately portrays the borders of China. The Times asserted that this was a betrayal of American values and all but treasonous. The logic of this argument is that the United States should follow the lead of government censors in Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia, who have banned the film.

Corporations, the Times declared, are the creatures of a particular state, however much their executives prefer to think of their operations as multinational. American companies choose to operate under the laws of the United States and to reap the benefits of life in the United Statesand they ought to be held accountable for upholding the values of the United States.

Such statements reveal the hostility of the Times to the democratic conceptions that are embodied in the American Constitution. The First Amendment states: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

That is, the government has no power to impose a set of religious, moral or political views on the people. There is not a universal set of American values that citizens, or companies, are obligated to uphold, or can be held accountable for opposing.

The Times is making a fascistic argument. It was the Nazi regime in Germany that asserted that the people must conform to the ethnic and religious values dictated by the state, and brutally repressed all those who did not or could not because of their background.

The editorials rhetoric about human rights and the freedom of expression is a smokescreen for the real agenda of the New York Times and the dominant sections of the American ruling class. US imperialism is preparing for a catastrophic war against China to prevent it challenging American global strategic and economic dominance.

For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the United States finds itself in a contestwith a country in its own weight class, the Times stated. China has taken a hard line, and its time for the United States to respond in kind.

Ideologically, the conditions for war are being prepared with hysteria about foreign interference and infiltration, and accusations of treason against all those who oppose militarism. Last month, the Washington Post promoted a report by the Hoover Institution that declared that it should no longer be acceptable that scholars, journalists, diplomats, and public officials from the Peoples Republic of China be afforded unfettered access to American society.

The New York Times, the unofficial mouthpiece of the Democrats, attacked Trump in its editorial for not being aggressive enough. The president, it declared, had weakened the ability of American companies to stand up for American values by failing to firmly oppose Chinas demands.

However bitter the factional conflict in Washington, both the Democratic and Republican parties are committed to reversing the inexorable decline in American capitalisms global hegemony by means of confrontation and war against China.

Andre Damon

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The New York Times, China, and the specter of the Yellow Peril - World Socialist Web Site