NY Times Botches Clinton E-Mail "Story"

Along with the Benghazi, Benghazi, BENGHAZI! nothing burger that's been created by the Rethuglicans and kept alive by an enabling Beltway media, the Clinton e-mail story has been a feeding frenzy for a political press corps that -- let's face it -- dislikes Secretary Clinton and wants to rough her up.  It's not that they believe they'll find something damaging, it's that they want to find something damaging, to hell with accuracy or checking sources.

As we noted in an update last week, the latest example of malfeasance in the service of a political smear sadly comes from the august New York Times.  A headline and story indicating that there was a "criminal investigation" of Ms. Clinton over the e-mails turned out to be far, far less.  It was such an egregious misfire on the part of the Times that they had to print a mealy mouthed explanation of how they got it wrong in today's edition.  It reads, in part:

"The online headline read “Criminal Inquiry Sought in Hillary Clinton’s Use of Email,” very similar to the one in print. But aspects of it began to unravel soon after it first went online. The first major change was this: It wasn’t really Mrs. Clinton directly who was the focus of the request for an investigation. It was more general: whether government information was handled improperly in connection with her use of a personal email account."

They were called out by sources familiar with the inquiry, particularly by Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, whose Rethug leadership is using the Committee to attack Ms. Clinton in advance of the 2016 elections.  Of course, the damage has been done, as the Times acknowledges:

"But you can’t put stories like this back in the bottle – they ripple through the entire news system. So it was, to put it mildly, a mess."

When the mainstream media willingly takes anonymous dreck from Rethuglican "sources" and catapults it to the general public on their front pages without applying the "smell test," they become part of the political apparatus of the right wing.