NYT political desk tacitly admits it blew 2016

With Republicans gearing up to ensure that Hillary Clinton doesn’t become president in 2020 — I think it just might work! — I’d like to point you to a couple of remarkable grafs from the (excellent) Baker and Haberman dispatch from Trump’s disease-ridden bunker that I linked to yesterday. First:

Campaign aides noted that the “Access Hollywood” tape with its sexually offensive banter that was seen as the end of his 2016 candidacy emerged on Oct. 7 that year, roughly the same point in the campaign as now. But something else happened that day that helped distract attention from the tape: the leak of emails stolen by Russia from Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman.

What we have here is a tacit admission that the media’s decision to devote enormous amounts of coverage to John Podesta’s inbox materially affected the election by burying the Access Hollywood story that on the merits should have dominated October. This wouldn’t be a problem had the hacked emails (like the Billy Bush colloquy) revealed actual scandalous behavior, but in fact the Podesta inbox received five-alarm coverage even though 1)the timing of the release removed any possible doubt that it was part of a ratfucking operation and 2)the emails not only contained no evidence of misconduct by Clinton or any of her associates but didn’t even contain any particularly interesting political gossip. Given how defensive some of her colleagues were when Amy Chozick raised questions about why the elite media decided to fully collaborate with a Russian intelligence campaign against a presidential candidate, this is a pretty remarkable admission even if they can’t quite bring themselves to explain why the Podesta inbox mattered so much despite containing so little of interest.

Anyway, this reflects what seems to be a quiet emerging internal consensus that the political press massively botched its coverage of the Podesta inbox, and, well, better late than never I guess.

The story continues:

Mr. Trump appeared eager for such a bolt of lightning this year as he talked with Ms. Bartiromo on Thursday. He spent a striking amount of time on the four-year-old investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s emails at the same time another 1,000 people died of the coronavirus in the United States on Wednesday and his own White House had become the biggest hot spot in the nation’s capital.

Dead-on. It is indeed absolutely indefensible to be going on and on about some inane bullshit involving Hillary Clinton’s emails when life-or-death issues are at stake.