FiveThirtyEight: Media attacks won't hurt Hillary among Dems

[Beet]

She explicitly arranged a domain name, pointed to dnmx records to a server in her house so that she could evade state department oversight...In other words she removed herself from government authority.  Good luck to Democrats that defend that.

I think in the end very few people will truly care about that.

But that's not the issue; evading government oversight as a public official is a grave transgression, regardless of whether or not she actually compromised national security. The fact that she took the risk of doing so demonstrates a serious lack of good judgement.

Her email account was not a secret and she is turning over all government related emails to the State Department and the Benghazi committee, where they will be subject to FOIA requests. Also, most of her emails went to .gov email accounts, so they are already in the possession of the government. There is no evidence that she has risked compromising national security because there is no indication classified information was ever on her private email, and even if it was, it would probably be because of the government's tendency to overclassify unimportant information. Besides, as the top official in the State Department, it's technically under her authority to decide what's classified and what isn't.

[Beet]

http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/hillary-clinton-media-bias-email/

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Good to see Democrats won't be buying the right-wing media's anti-Hillary smears!

Most Republicans seem to constantly fall for the the "I didn't do anything wrong, the liberal media is just out to get me" non-sense, so it shouldn't be any surprise that most Democrats seem to fall for the equally absurd "I didn't do anything wrong, the conservative media is just out to get me" version.  When politicians in either party face criticism, negative news stories, or become embroiled in scandals, one of the easiest and most reliable responses is to claim or imply that it is just part of a smear campaign by the right/left-wing media.  

In reality, the media doesn't have an ideology, for example I doubt most of the commentary by the talking heads at Fox (or MSNBC for that matter) is informed by any sort of genuine ideological conviction.  Certainly nothing beyond the generic "I'd prefer for this party to win, I guess" that most voters probably have.

The media doesn't have an ideology (unless you mean capitalism), but it does have a certain character. And conservatives aren't entirely wrong when they say that outlets traditionally labelled the "mainstream media", such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, and to a lesser extent network news (more years ago in the days of Cronkite, etc. than today) is much more culturally/politically alien to their POV than it is to the American center-left. Sometimes, that is more in evidence than others.

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I'd say Obama during his whole 2008 campaign (and to a lesser extent, 2012 as well).

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Well, the poll has shown that there is a significant audience that thought the media was too hard on Clinton vs. Obama in 2008, but that didn't affect the "media". There was a significant audience opposed to Bush starting a war in Iraq in 2003, but that didn't prevent the media, including "liberal" media outlets, from cheerleading for that war to start, and so on...

Hillary's comment about the vast right-wing conspiracy has nothing to do with this. She was referring to a network of mostly alternative media sources, such as talk radio, the National Review, etc. Emailgate was broken by the New York Times and is fueled by "mainstream sources." They, too, have an adversarial relationship with Hillary, which they, themselves, are the first, to admit. Confusing this latter adverserial relationship with Hillary's 1998 comment is to completely misunderstand the 1998 comment.

[Beet]

At the end of the day, the media only cares about making money.  If saying stupid sh!t for attention, race-baiting, affirming the worldview of a particular party's base or certain demographic groups, sensationalized "reporting", fear-mongering, misinforming viewers, treating non-stories as Big News, etc boosts ratings and thus leads to more advertising dollars, that's what they'll do.  If such things didn't work or stopped working, they'd try something else.

Even the media's corporatism likely stems more from the financial incentive to promote the economic interests of the companies that own ABC, NBC, MSNBC, FOX, CNN, CNBC, CBS, etc than from any sort of genuine ideological commitment to a pro-big business ideological agenda.  This probably contributes to the lack of investigative reporting a little bit, but that can probably be primarily attributed to a combination of laziness and most importantly the unfortunate fact that investigative reporting usually doesn't produce stories that attract as many viewers as CNN babbling about a missing Malaysian airplane (whose direct impact on the viewer or someone they know well can be fully explained in no more than two concise and simple sentences).  Actually, that's probably a good test for how damaging a scandal will be (how many concise sentences would it take to convey it's significance and impact to someone who doesn't follow politics at all).

A lot of this is true (and I've said it before as well), but to totally reduce the media to an economic actor while denying its separate sociological character, as well as the sociological nature of the very determinants of the "eyeballs" the media are so desperate for, is to make the same mistake as the neoclassical economists who think they can model an entire economy through homo economus or the rational man maximizing his utility.

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The analysis of Fox News and MSNBC is good, but just because news outlets aren't arms of party committees, and just because financial incentive plays a huge part in their behavior, it doesn't mean that everything about the news media can be understood by financial behavior. The people who work in news media are human, too, and they have their own attitudes, biases, prejudices, characteristics, etc. that are no better or worse than anyone. They also construct social memes ("conventional wisdom") that take on lives of their own, independent of financial incentive. Some politicians they happen to latch onto in a more or less adulatory manner (Obama, Bill Clinton when he turns on his "charm", John McCain circa 2000), while others they tend to have a more troublesome relationship with (Al Gore "the exaggerator", Hillary Clinton).

[Beet]

Yes, and while no one would say an adversarial media relationship is a good thing for any politician, I think people who dislike Clinton and think of her as "just another Bush or a Clinton, a boring person getting by on her name and lack of male genitals" tend to underestimate how much it is part of her appeal as well. And not just the media, but all of her numerous enemies... it's what makes her a fighter, which is, to many of her supporters, her best quality. Ever since the American people were introduced to this woman by the name of Hillary Rodham Clinton, "no Tammy Wynette standing by her man", who muscled into an administration she was not elected to, and tried to manage a more ambitious health care overhaul than Obamacare (one with cost reforms as well as universal coverage) she has been a fighter.

[Beet]

Eleanor Roosevelt was a much better First Lady. There was some serious talk of Truman / Roosevelt 1948.

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http://www.trumanlibrary.org/eleanor/1948.html

Of course Eleanor was a wonderful lady, but she's also rather dead (without having been elected to anything), and thus safe to heap praise upon. If Hillary were to announce a renunciation of office now (as she should), I'm sure her favor-abilities would rise with time as well. But for women, praise with a tinge of condescension has always been easier actually reaching for the chalice of power. The only difference is that now there is a more realistic chance than in Eleanor's time.

[Beet]

Anyway, it doesn't matter. Hillary won't win. I've just returned from the Washington Post comments section, and I could not find a single positive original comment about Hillary. I scrolled down until Internet Explorer stopped responding. Hundreds of comments. Not 90-10, not 95-5, not even 99-1 (as one comment suggested), but literally 100% to 0%. She'd be crazy to run. She'll be buried in the hate. Mark my words.

[Beet]

Anyway, it doesn't matter. Hillary won't win. I've just returned from the Washington Post comments section, and I could not find a single positive original comment about Hillary. I scrolled down until Internet Explorer stopped responding. Hundreds of comments. Not 90-10, not 95-5, not even 99-1 (as one comment suggested), but literally 100% to 0%. She'd be crazy to run. She'll be buried in the hate. Mark my words.

Hold on

Wait a minute

Back up

You use Internet Explorer?

Yes, in Windows 8, IE offers better integration with the OS than other browsers.

In any case, I checked out the Huffington Post comments on a hunch, and reviewing a random Hillary story does find more negative comments, but also a significant number of positive comments. So perhaps all is not lost after all. I wonder what the difference is between the Washington vs. Huffington posts? The former is older, and has anonymous comments. The latter is newer, and has Facebook comments.

One last thought: This is a case that would really show the power of Big Data. Using sentiment analysis with knowledge of the demographics of visitors to various websites, a large tech firm could probably ascertain a political candidate's support among various demographics! That information would be quite valuable. Now I'm going to finish off this beer and head to bed.