Yes, The New York Times Was Obsessed With Hillary Clinton’s Emails. Here’s Proof.

I, for one, would be happy to set aside the question of whether the New York Times was obsessed with Hillary Clinton’s emails, and just call it water under the bridge. (Indeed, I’ve already got it out of my system.)

But Times writers seem to have other plans. On Sunday, not one, but two prominent New York Times writers took to Twitter to vent about the subject.

The first was this stubborn, rather childish response to a Nate Silver tweet from Times writer Nick Confessore.

The other was a long battle between MSNBC host Joy Reid and Times reporter Maggie Haberman (it’s too long to post here, but I encourage you to take a look).

I wrote a lot about this throughout the campaign, and I decided to go back to the Lexis media database, get the data and hopefully settle this once and for all. Here’s what I found.

I decided to look at the critical time between the Democratic Convention (when the first Wikileaks emails were released) and election night. I jotted down what I thought were the major stories of the campaign, searched how many Times stories mentioned each for the proscribed time period, and then did the same for Clinton’s emails. The result was eye-opening:

Let’s get this in a full sentence: Between the Democratic Convention and election night, Clinton’s emails were mentioned in more New York Times stories than the presidential debates, Trump’s tax returns, the Trump University fraud litigation, the Access Hollywood tape, Trump’s proposed Muslim ban, and the vice presidential debate combined.

Next, for the same time period, I looked to see what percentage of all stories that mentioned either Trump or Clinton also mentioned Clinton’s emails. This gives us a general picture of how much of the overall election coverage included references to Clinton’s emails.

A note on methodology: in order to get the share of total news coverage, I had to eliminate duplicates. For example, many of the stories about the presidential debates also mentioned Clinton’s emails. These cases were counted as Clinton-email stories.

You may say that’s unfair: why should a story about the presidential debate that happens to mention Clinton’s emails nonetheless count as a Clinton email story? Because the tendency of the New York Times to qualify every story throughout the campaign with a reminder about Clinton’s emails indicates exactly the sort of obsession and bias we’re trying to measure.

A Times writer would likely respond that it is the job of a reporter to include context, thus forcing responsible writers to constantly cite back to Clinton’s emails. But that’s exactly the point. If the Times is bent on painting a full picture (as it should be), there’s still the question of why the pictures included so many strokes of Clinton’s emails, at the expense of those of, say, Trump’s fraudulent business schemes or his confession of sexual assault on tape.

Whatever you think about this objection, here are the results:

In other words, between the Democratic Convention and election night, one out of every four stories mentioning either Trump or Clinton in the New York Times also mentioned Hillary Clinton’s emails.

If Times writers want to argue that Clinton’s emails deserved this level of coverage, they are free to do so. But please, stop arguing with the data.