JUDGING BY the amount of time NBC’s Matt Lauer spent pressing Hillary Clinton on her emails during Wednesday’s national security presidential forum, one would think that her homebrew server was one of the most important issues facing the country this election. It is not. There are a thousand other substantive issues — from China’s aggressive moves in the South China Sea to National Security Agency intelligence-gathering to military spending — that would have revealed more about what the candidates know and how they would govern. Instead, these did not even get mentioned in the first of 5½ precious prime-time hours the two candidates will share before Election Day, while emails took up a third of Ms. Clinton’s time. [snip]
Imagine how history would judge today’s Americans if, looking back at this election, the record showed that voters empowered a dangerous man because of . . . a minor email scandal. There is no equivalence between Ms. Clinton’s wrongs and Mr. Trump’s manifest unfitness for office. (our emphasis)The Post cites examples of how this equivalence has crept into the campaign narrative (without acknowledging the contribution of its own political reportage to the problem).
If Lauer's egregious questioning of Hillary Clinton in the "Commander in Chief Forum" the other day has had any salutary effect, perhaps it's the dawning realization in the media that they've been playing with fire in allowing this insipid "scandal" (and that created around the Clinton Foundation, we should add) to become a defining issue in this existential election. We'll see if it's too little, too late.
In the meantime, it might be helpful for your national desk and its political "journalists" to read this editorial, WaPo.
