How The Atlantic Summarized The FBI’s Statement on Clinton’s Emails (Hint: In Her Favor)

By The Stream Published on July 6, 2016

If you want to know how the sophisticated liberal elite wants you to understand an issue, read The Atlantic. It’s one of America’s oldest and greatest magazines, and after 160 years is still creative and interesting. To be fair, it’s not completely liberal, but when liberalism’s basic commitments, and the people who incarnate them, get in trouble, The Atlantic is going to help.

Its daily email, “The Atlantic Daily,” begins with a section of short items called “What We’re Following.” In the one for Tuesday, July 5th, the first and third items in that section were the war in the Middle East and the satellite that just arrived at Jupiter. The second story ran:

The Email Controversy Bigger Than Inbox Zero: The FBI concluded its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s secretive email practices while she was U.S. secretary of state and determined it would not recommend bringing criminal charges against her. The announcement is a huge win for the Clinton campaign as it heads to the Democratic convention this month, but the email controversy is sure to live on through the general election, wherein Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, will continue using it to portray Clinton as an untrustworthy candidate.

This is a news story. What, on as objective a judgment as a journalist can manage, is the story it’s supposed to be covering? What should a magazine, whatever its political commitments, say? What should the editors say in the mailing they use to tell their readers what they think is most important that day?

The Real Story

Part of the story is that the former first lady, former senator, former secretary of state, now Democratic candidate for president and frontrunner in the race wasn’t indicted. That’s part of the story, all right. There’s a lot of drama in the fact that the Former Etc. could have been indicted because Former Etc’s pretty much never face the possibility of being indicted for a crime. (Some of them should be, but that’s another matter.)

So The Atlantic got that right. Even that they had to downplay. It’s a “huge win” even though that bad man Donald Trump (boo! hiss!) will exploit it — which is a subtle way of telling the reader that the news doesn’t matter, since that bad man Donald Trump (boo! hiss!) will use it and we all know how untrustworthy and dishonest he is. It may still be a political problem, but it’s not a moral problem.

What’s the other big part of the story that an objective — or at least not pro-Clinton — journalist would have included? This is not hard, Atlantic editors.

It’s the fact that the former first lady, former senator, former secretary of state now Democratic candidate for president and frontrunner in the race was royally chewed out by the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Director. Of the FBI.

And that what he said shows she lied up and down. Even the normally cautious Associated Press pointed this out and the normally liberal Washington Post did too in its story on the FBI announcement, while its fact-checker column gave Clinton four Pinocchios, meaning “Whoppers” (see this also). Other major media reported critically as well. This kind of official dressing down does not ever happen to Former Etc’s.

No, that’s not quite right: Actually it happened once, 43 years ago, to, wait, Richard Nixon. The FBI has just revealed that Hillary Clinton’s classically Nixonian. Lovely.

That’s the other half of the story, the half The Atlantic left out in its daily mailing. It’s part of the story any journalist should tell. And The Atlantic didn’t, because, we have to suspect, it made their favored candidate look bad.

Is the longer story to which the “The Atlantic Daily” mailing linked better? Not really. It did mention the FBI director’s judgement — halfway down the fourth paragraph. The rest offered a bland account of Clinton’s interview by the FBI, a bland description of her husband’s meeting with the Attorney General at the Phoenix airport, and the use Donald Trump will make of the story. Essentially: Move along, nothing to see here, move along.

For what it’s worth: If you want to find a real liberal critique of Clinton and her abuse of secrecy, you’re going to have to go past the publications of standard mainstream liberalism to the real lefty writers, like Glenn Greenwald. For example, see his article on Washington’s pre-Clinton obsession with privacy.

Two Stories

What do The Atlantic‘s editors tell their readers? Hillary wasn’t indicted, and some other stuff happened. What don’t they tell their readers? That the director of the FBI criticized her severely and indirectly exposed how much she’d lied about the affair and gave her opponents evidence against her for which they can claim the authority of the FBI.

If the subject of the investigation had been, oh, Marco Rubio, the Atlantic‘s daily email would have run something like this.

The Email Controversy Bigger Than Inbox Zero: The FBI concluded its investigation of Marco Rubio’s secretive email practices while he was U.S. senator and found he had been “extremely careless” in handling classified material. Though the FBI said it would not recommend bringing criminal charges against him, despite the evidence, a move that has been sharply criticized, it laid out an extensive description that contradicted Rubio’s previous claims at many points. The announcement is a big blow for the Rubio campaign as it heads to the Republican convention this month, and the controversy is sure to live on through the general election, wherein Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, will use it to show Rubio as an untrustworthy candidate who can’t be trusted with the security of the United States.

Same facts. But a very different story.

Update: Even The New Yorker, one of The Atlantic‘s peers, reported on the FBI director’s expose and its effect in staff writer John Cassidy’s A Damning Reprieve for Hillary Clinton. He mentioned also the crucial un-asked question: The director’s statement “didn’t address the issue of why she set it up, or whether its existence broke the State Department’s rules, which is what the department’s inspector general concluded.”

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