Donald Trump’s May 31 press conference, in which he defended his fundraising for veterans, put the pro-Clinton bias of the media on display once again.
The Washington Post was justified in looking into the results of Trump’s January fundraiser for veterans, and Trump should never have allowed his campaign manager to falsely claim that his one million dollar personal donation had already been made.
But it quickly became clear that, even after Trump had provided an accounting, the media were determined to stretch this out as an ongoing “scandal”. Trump had raised “only” $5.6 million so far, not $6 million. He had been too slow to choose worthy organizations and make the donations. Had he been more hasty, and spent less time checking out the organizations, the result would surely have been more stories like the one criticizing one recipient organization for spending too little on its veterans’ programs.
And where is the same kind of enthusiastically pursued investigation of Hillary Clinton?
Was it the news media that broke the story about Clinton’s unauthorized – and possibly criminal – use of a private email account for official State Department business? No, the unraveling of that scandal has been the result of Republican members of Congress and the conservative organization Judicial Watch.
The news media have covered the email scandal only because they had no choice. Ignoring it would have meant that their audience would have gone to the more conservative media to find out what Clinton had done. Of course, the media made sure to include liberal defenders who insisted that Clinton had done nothing wrong, had followed the rules, had done only what other Secretaries of State had done, and would be completely exonerated. (The recent report of the State Department’s Inspector General put the lie to every one of those claims.)
Likewise, it was not The Washington Post or The New York Times but Peter Schweizer who first did the research into the Clintons’ rise to wealth and their potential conflicts of interest, producing the book (and forthcoming movie), Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. Only when the story became too big to ignore did the media pick it up – only to drop it as soon as possible.
The U.S. intervention in Libya should be a good topic for investigative journalism. Why did Hillary Clinton support going to war against Libya and overthrowing its government? Who was she trying to benefit? How did she fail to see the long-term consequences of turning Libya into a country without an effective government, available as a base for terrorist groups targeting the United States? What does this say about her competence to serve as commander-in-chief?
Clinton’s statement that she would go farther than Obama in using presidential power to provide amnesty to illegal aliens is something that should have brought tough questions from the media. Obama’s Office of Legal Counsel had advised him that he could legally go no further than he did in his amnesty announced in November 2014. Anything more, said the OLC, would exceed his constitutional powers. (Even the 2014 amnesty has been struck down by a Federal judge and is now awaiting a decision from the Supreme Court.) Clinton needs to be asked what legal basis she thinks she has for a larger amnesty. Is she planning to simply ignore the Constitution? Would she obey an unfavorable Supreme Court decision?
Every presidential candidate should be the subject of detailed scrutiny by the media. Trump is receiving that, and more. It’s time for the media to turn their spotlight on Hillary Clinton.
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