Rachel Maddow is absolutely right
On Friday, the Donald Trump-controlled State Department quietly announced what anyone paying proper attention has known from day one: after a four year “investigation,” there never was any Hillary Clinton email scandal. No one ever intentionally did anything wrong with their email. It was never a scandal. It certainly wasn’t a Hillary Clinton scandal. This bit of fateful hindsight does us no good whatsoever when it comes to the 2016 election – but as Rachel Maddow pointed out on Monday night, it could make all the difference going forward.
I first entered the world of political analysis in the summer of 2015, when the hype about the supposed Hillary Clinton email scandal was first exploding in the media. It was obvious that the Republicans in Congress had simply manufactured a “scandal” around the fact that Clinton had done what the previous two Secretaries of State had done: they’d set up a system to work around the notoriously unreliable State Department email server. End of story. There was no story. Except when it came to ratings, it was the only story.
The media knew from the start that there was no email scandal. But the media was also expecting Clinton to win the election no matter what they said, so they thought they could play up the imaginary email scandal for easy TV ratings and online page views, and no harm would be done. I saw CNN and MSNBC join Fox News in wall-to-wall nonsensical speculation about how Hillary could be forced out of the race, or even sent to prison, over this imaginary scandal. I saw major news outlets make up fake stories about everyone from John Kerry to Michael Dukakis preparing to enter the race because Clinton was dropping out. I saw the New York Times publish such a work of fiction about Hillary’s emails, it had to issue two retractions to cover all the false information in the story.
And here I was, a newbie with no reputation and a small audience, trying to explain each day that there was no Hillary Clinton email scandal. Bernie Sanders stood on stage and said he was tired of hearing about the email story because it wasn’t important. But none of this mattered to the media, which just kept cashing in by hyping up the most ridiculous false media narrative in modern U.S. political history. And the public kept lapping it up, because when every major news outlet keeps pushing the same crap about the same fake scandal all day every day, there’s little reason for the public not to think there’s something to it.
Again, there’s no undoing the 2016 election. We don’t have a time machine. We can’t even demand that every journalist must resign if they hyped the email scandal in dishonest fashion, because we’d frankly be left with very few journalists. All we can really do is push the media to handle things more honestly in the 2020 election. In that regard, there’s some degree of hope.
Thus far, outside of the bowels of Fox News and other bottom-feeding news outlets that are only pandering to far-right voters anyway, the mainstream media has largely framed the fake Joe Biden scandal as a fake scandal. This is a pretty low bar, as we’re literally applauding the media for not promoting what it knows is a fake story. But this is still crucial, because if the media had honestly framed the fake Hillary Clinton email scandal as being a fake scandal, Donald Trump wouldn’t be smearing feces on the walls of the Oval Office right now.
The trouble is this: sooner or later the media will reach a lull in the 2020 election cycle, and it’ll be tempted to start treating the fake Biden scandal as if it were real. Whether Biden is your favorite or least favorite candidate, that’s irrelevant. If the media starts playing up the fake Biden scandal, it’ll be doing Donald Trump’s bidding, which can only serve to hurt the entire Democratic field. Also, they may not stop at Biden. What about a fake Warren scandal or a fake Buttigieg scandal? If and when the media gives in to temptation and begins playing up the fake Biden scandal (or any other fake scandal) for ratings, it’ll be up to all of us to start pushing back against the media as fiercely as possible.
