Less Balance, More News- How Our Media is Failing in 2016

Over a year ago, I said Hillary Clinton would never be charged in connection with the faux “email scandal” that has followed her around during this campaign for the Presidency. I didn’t say that because i’m a conspiracy theorist, I said it because the whole thing was a non-story. You are allowed to have a private server as a cabinet secretary (legally, but I don’t recommend it politically), something being classified today doesn’t mean it was then, the statutes in question have been used one time in their history (on an espionage case), and despite Director Comey’s complaints of Hillary being careless with classified data, she didn’t openly share it with people without clearance, like David Petraeus was convicted for. In short, there was no way this case was going to take down a Presidential front-runner.

And yet it went on for a whole year plus, treated as a serious story. The coverage was simply false, and gave the impression that she was in serious trouble. She wasn’t. So why was it covered like it was so?

For one, the media is hellbent on balance. They so badly don’t want to be called bias that they will report whatever either side of an issue says, just so no one can attack their integrity. This is why there is a “debate” about whether climate change is real. This is why we got into the Iraq War on clearly bogus intelligence. A point doesn’t have to have factual integrity or any numbers supporting it. It just has to be repeated enough times to be accepted as the one side’s point.

I suspect this is really about keeping people interested in an election that from it’s outset looked like it would not be interesting. Hillary was going to cruise to the nomination, and while it might not have been reported this way, she did end up winning by a healthy margin. The Republican Party is a mess that does not appear up to winning a national election- we knew that 18 months ago though. While I have no doubt that the 2016 election is at least competitive enough to make Hillary work for it, ultimately I think the media could read the tea leaves early about how it is likely to go, and so they decided to try to stay relevant. If one side is uncompetitive and spewing nonsense, that’s eventually a boring story. So, instead of good reporting, we get this.

I’d personally like to see the media report the actual facts, and cut out the talking points. Allowing political leaders, in this case the entire Republican Party, to drag out a useless, pointless, ultimately wasteful investigation of Hillary’s emails, or worse yet, Benghazi, did not serve any public interest. It did not make us better at anything as a country. An honest media would have shot the story down as bunk from the outset. A “balanced” media, the one we have, let one side continue to talk about a quixotic chase for a scandal they’ll never find. As a country, we deserve better than the “balance” we’re getting.