Toobin Expresses Regret...3 Years Later!
Jeffrey Toobin, a journalist for The New Yorker and member of the CNN News Team, has admitted, almost three years later, that he "expresses regret" for his coverage over the trial involving Hillary Clinton. Initially in 2016, when the scandal first made worldwide news, Toobin was one of the first to write an article involving Clinton's private email server. He admitted this on October 18th during the final hearings of Clinton's trial involving the email scandal.
Toobin admitted that many responses to his initial article have been mixed, with many thanking him for what he said, while others criticized him for writing it in the first place, calling him vulgar names and some even threatening him.
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| Jeffrey Toobin |
According to Politico, the conclusion of the nearly three-year State Department investigation into the Clinton email saga has reignited criticism among Democrats of the news media’s heavy coverage of the issue in the 2016 election. The claims that she had exposed classified secrets through her use of a private server dogged Clinton down to the final days of the campaign, when a surprise admission by then-FBI Director James Comey that the bureau was reopening its probe into the emails corresponded with a last-minute downturn in her polling numbers.
Nonetheless, the State Department found there “was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information” by any officials while Clinton was serving as secretary of State, a conclusion that Democrats quickly seized upon to bemoan the campaign coverage.
Most of those journalists have kept quiet. But Toobin didn’t mince words Monday in offering a mea culpa on CNN, where he serves as chief legal analyst. “I talked about the emails here at CNN, I wrote about it in The New Yorker,” he said. “And I think I paid too much attention to them and I regret that.”
Brian Fallon, who served as Clinton’s press secretary in 2016, said, “Toobin’s comments were refreshingly honest and admirable and it’s a level of introspection that I don’t think we’ve seen from another single journalist of his prominence.”
Still, Fallon doesn’t consider Toobin one of the main offenders, noting that the analyst is booked on television to provide legal commentary on topics decided upon by producers and executives. Fallon believes there should be an industry-wide reckoning over 2016 coverage and puts the onus on newsroom leaders, such as CNN chief Jeff Zucker and New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet, as well as those “making decisions on conference calls and in editorial meetings and changing headlines and deciding the placement of stories.”
According to Politico, The Times, in particular, has faced scrutiny for its front-page treatment of Clinton email stories in the final months of the election, including after the Comey letter, and so it’s handling of the State Department having concluded its yearslong investigation didn’t go unnoticed.
“For months, @nytimes put stories of Hillary Clinton’s email on its front pages,” Ploughshares Fund President Joe Cirincione tweeted Saturday. “The final investigative report clearing all of wrongdoing? That is on page 16 today.”
The Times’ Amy Chozick, who covered Clinton in 2016, wrote last year how she “became an unwitting agent of Russian intelligence” in covering the hacked Democratic National Committee and John Podesta emails, though editors have largely defended covering those emails because they were released publicly and deemed newsworthy.
Toobin has spoken before about contributing to false equivalency and made clear his comments Monday were only about his own coverage, not that of the media writ large. But he suggested more broadly that journalists, who can be “the most thin-skinned people about criticism,” are well-served by self-reflection.
“We dish it out,” he said. “We should take it.”
Toobin has admitted that he's not upset about anything he has said about the scandal or Clinton's email use, but he does regret not stressing the importance of the situation enough, claiming the coverage was insufficient for the importance of the issue.
Toobin had this to say during his interview with Politco: “I think I got into the trap of false equivalence during the 2016 campaign. Comparing Donald Trump’s record of ethical problems with Hillary’s emails lent a misleading impression. And I have to say, I am determined not to do that again to the extent that I can. I am going to try to look at corruption and ethics issues each on their own rather than trying to create some sort of equivalence that isn’t there.”
Recently, Toobin claims to be covering the Ukraine situation involving Hunter Biden, claiming that the magnitude of what is happening there and what happened in 2016 with the email scandal should be the same, and that he does not a repeat of the effects of his previous article.
According to Politico, Joe Biden’s campaign has aggressively pushed back on coverage of Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine in hopes of not becoming ”Hillary 2.0” and allow unfounded allegations of impropriety involving the former vice president and 2020 Democratic candidate linger to the extent that the email stories did for Clinton four years earlier.
Brian Fallon, who served as Clinton’s press secretary in 2016, said, “Toobin’s comments were refreshingly honest and admirable and it’s a level of introspection that I don’t think we’ve seen from another single journalist of his prominence.”
Still, Fallon doesn’t consider Toobin one of the main offenders, noting that the analyst is booked on television to provide legal commentary on topics decided upon by producers and executives. Fallon believes there should be an industry-wide reckoning over 2016 coverage and puts the onus on newsroom leaders, such as CNN chief Jeff Zucker and New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet, as well as those “making decisions on conference calls and in editorial meetings and changing headlines and deciding the placement of stories.”
According to Politico, The Times, in particular, has faced scrutiny for its front-page treatment of Clinton email stories in the final months of the election, including after the Comey letter, and so it’s handling of the State Department having concluded its yearslong investigation didn’t go unnoticed.
“For months, @nytimes put stories of Hillary Clinton’s email on its front pages,” Ploughshares Fund President Joe Cirincione tweeted Saturday. “The final investigative report clearing all of wrongdoing? That is on page 16 today.”
The Times’ Amy Chozick, who covered Clinton in 2016, wrote last year how she “became an unwitting agent of Russian intelligence” in covering the hacked Democratic National Committee and John Podesta emails, though editors have largely defended covering those emails because they were released publicly and deemed newsworthy.
Toobin has spoken before about contributing to false equivalency and made clear his comments Monday were only about his own coverage, not that of the media writ large. But he suggested more broadly that journalists, who can be “the most thin-skinned people about criticism,” are well-served by self-reflection.
“We dish it out,” he said. “We should take it.”
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