We've already blogged the Hillary Clinton's stunning nerve on display on Fox News Sunday.
The performance netted her Four Pinocchios from the Washington Post fact checker for her easily checkable porkie pie that FBI Director James Comey had said that she told the truth about her emails.
If you only read the New York Times, you might not have heard about Mrs. Clinton's astonishing lack of candor.
None other than the Gray Lady's own ombudsman Liz Spayd writes about the omission in a column headlined "The Clinton Story You Didn't Read Here:"
Hillary Clinton, in a rare interview on Fox News last Sunday, claimed that the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey Jr., had called her statements about her private email servers “truthful” and said she has been consistent with the American people in her accounts about the controversy. As it turns out, Clinton’s contentions in the interview were misleading, bordering on false.
If you’re getting all your political news from The New York Times, this may be the first time you’re hearing this. Clinton’s remarks were covered by several major news organizations, several of which pointedly challenged the Democratic nominee’s candor. But nothing on the interview ever appeared in The Times, either online or in print.
. . .
For a candidate who had just emerged from a sharply choreographed convention, with a solid bounce in the polls, it was surprising that Clinton would prominently stumble over the email servers again, and on Fox. It was clearly news.
I asked Carolyn Ryan, The Times’s political editor, about the decision not to cover Clinton’s remarks about the email controversy. Here’s how she responded: “It is a subject we have covered aggressively — especially how her comments compare to what the F.B.I. found — and will continue to do so.”
Indeed The Times has been aggressive in its coverage of the email servers, both in digging up news and analyzing the fallout. The Clinton interview may have felt like more of the same, especially coming as it did on the same day Trump made a flip remark about a Muslim couple who lost their son in Iraq and appeared at the Democratic convention.
And yet the Times missed this astonishing story–and a story that was not hard to get.
James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal comments:
Spayd doesn’t take a clear position on whether the paper erred in ignoring the story, about which she writes both that “it was clearly news” and that it “may have felt like more of the same, especially coming as it did on the same day [Donald] Trump made a flip remark about a Muslim couple who lost their son in Iraq and appeared at the Democratic convention.”
We tend to agree with the former observation. As for the latter, surely a news organization with the Times’s resources could cover both stories, as this columnist did; we weighed in on the Trump-Khizr Khan kerfuffle on Tuesday.
If you sometimes feel that you and your liberal friends (a fraught concept in this most vicious of all political seasons I can remember) aren't getting the same news, you are right.
Trump's picking a fight with the Khans is definitely a story, and it may be a turning point in the race–but Clinton's blatant–ah–untruth is, too.