Why did Andrea Mitchell not set the example
Sometimes one wonders if these journalists do not realize that they are also under scrutiny as well. Andrea Mitchell admitted an inconvenient truth even if a bit more subtle than the one admitted by Chuck Todd a few weeks ago. She definitely was not at her best at Hillary Clinton’s news conference.
“There were a number of us from the State Department Press core who covered her before,” Andrea Mitchell said. “Who really wanted to cover the International Women’s Day events. I was in Beijing with her in 1995. … This was incredibly meaningful. I think the report they issued jointly with the Gates Foundation yesterday, the Clinton Foundation and Gates Foundation report, the no ceilings report was very important and had a lot of data in it. And I wish we had been working on that. Frankly.”
The reality is Andrea Mitchell had a choice. She could have bucked the prevailing winds in that room and asked a real probative question on the report. Hillary Clinton would have likely given her a complete answer and commended her for her maturity for not succumbing to the climate of false scandals.
Journalists had their ineptitude and gullibility in full display. How difficult is it to understand that every email has at least one recipient. If she is doing business within the government then the government is the recipient of that email and as such that email is captured. If she is emailing to anyone external from the government as Secretary of State that mail resides on some relay somewhere and as such there is no inducement to lie. If all else fails, we know the NSA stores everything and as such her emails would likely leak. It is the height of the dereliction of duty for journalists to allow themselves to be hoodwinked by Right Wing operatives.
Andrea Mitchell like most journalists today fell into the trap. They burn their energy on stories they are fed instead of investigating on their own. That is why they are all covering a very narrow scope of issues.
Andrea Mitchell was the second journalist Hillary Clinton called on. She had already answered the email question. “Can you explain how you decided which of the personal emails to get rid of?” Andrea Mitchell asked. “How you got rid of them and when? And how you would respond to questions about you being the arbiter of what you release? And secondly, could you answer the questions that have been raised about foreign contributions from Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia that abuse women or permit violence against women to the family foundation and whether that disturbs you as you are rightly celebrating 20 years of leadership on this issue?”
How does either of those questions substantively comport to the seriousness of the International Women’s day? They do not.