Eric Boehlert

[Commentary] The White House’s petulant decision to ban several major news outlets from a media gaggle with press secretary Sean Spicer ignited justifiable outrage among journalists. And the outcry was noticeably bipartisan. “This is an attempt to bully the press by using access as a weapon to manipulate coverage,” warned Bret Stephens, the deputy editorial page director for The Wall Street Journal. Now that outrage needs to be institutionalized. It needs to be backed up by the power and prestige of the country’s largest news organizations. In other words, it’s time for institutions to take collective action and fight back.

[Commentary] In the last two weeks, which include the media's meltdown over FBI Director James Comey’s unprecedented decision to insert the bureau into the election process, ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News set aside a total of 25 minutes to cover the e-mails. That compares to their grand total of three minutes for covering policy during that span. For the entire 2016 year, however, the networks have devoted zero minutes to in-depth policy discussions of climate change, drugs, poverty, guns, infrastructure, social injustice, or the deficit. But they dedicated 125 minutes to Clinton e-mails.

What’s been utterly depressing is the collective decision to relentlessly cover a story that had already been beaten to death nine different times and from every conceivable angle. That and the fact that lazy email mania bumped aside actual, important news that Americans deserve to know about.

[Commentary] Overall, think about how irresponsibly the press has handled the truly never-ending Hillary Clinton e-mail saga, and then ask yourself this: If the Democratic nominee already had lingering doubts about the press’ fairness, would the media’s performance in recent days have done anything to allay those fears? The press for years has fixated on Hillary Clinton’s relationship with the press, and specifically the idea that Hillary Clinton doesn’t like the press or trust the press, and that’s what accounts for the “famous Clinton secrecy.” As I’ve noted in the past, reporters can rarely point to any concrete evidence that Clinton disdains journalists. And with the arrival of Donald Trump’s campaign, in which the Republican regularly smears, taunts, and attacks journalists, the anti-press claim about Clinton came to be viewed as rather quaint in comparison. But it’s possible that over her 20-plus years on the national stage and having seen out-of-control “scandal” coverage up close, she maintains a certain level of well-earned distrust.

The media’s ongoing e-mail coverage since 2015 has likely done little to alter that, and especially the off-kilter and overblown FBI Director Comey coverage in recent days. Having invested thousands of hours covering the e-mail story over the last year-and-a-half, a story that has produced no criminal charges (but has produced hollow congressional hearings), the press still remains fully committed to pretending it’s a Very Big Scandal, which explained the unfettered caterwauling following the FBI news. So yes, maybe that’s one reason Clinton might distrust the press.

[Commentary] Somebody inside the Associated Press should hide the shovels so editors there will stop digging. The hole they’ve dug in recent days just keeps getting bigger as the wire service refuses to admit obvious mistakes in the lengthy investigation they published last week about Clinton Foundation donors, and the implication they were able to buy access at Hillary Clinton’s State Department. Not only was the AP article itself deeply flawed and lacking crucial context, the news organization also tweeted out this categorically false announcement to its 8.4 million followers to promote its investigation: “BREAKING: AP analysis: More than half those who met Clinton as Cabinet secretary gave money to Clinton Foundation.”

As the AP investigation began to crumble, I noted that the wire service joined a dubious list of news outlets that have gotten burned chasing bogus Clinton “scandal” stories over the years. And now we’re seeing the postscript to that sad tradition: News outlets which then refuse to admit they botched their Clinton “scandal” stories. There’s a stubborn refusal to clean up their own mess.

[Eirc Boehlert is a senior fellow with Media Matters for America]

[Commentary] The Star-Ledger's owner announced massive layoffs at the newspaper as part of a larger effort at consolidation. Now, entire sections of the Newark newsroom sit empty; a newsroom that has shed an astonishing 240 jobs since 2008, or two-thirds of its former staff.

Philadelphia columnist Will Bunch called the Star-Ledger pink slips for reporters the "best news" of Christie's career. Why? "With fewer of them on the beat, Christie -- and all the other corrupt politicians of the Garden State -- will be able to keep more of their secrets from the public than ever before."

But the sad news regarding the Star-Ledger isn't just about the challenges New Jersey's largest newspaper faces trying to cover the 11th most populous state with a newsroom one-third its previous size. The larger, disturbing question is what happens to newsgathering, and what happens to a democracy, when the cutbacks show no signs of abating while at the same time new, super-donor forces in American politics, led by people like the Koch brothers, exert unprecedented influence via staggering sums of money, misinformation, and faux news on the state level. "We are going to consolidate ourselves right out of a democracy," quipped one New Jersey journalist.

Charles and David Koch aren't alone among right-wing donors eager to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat Democrats and to permanently alter the political landscape. Aspiring Republican presidential candidates recently traveled to Las Vegas for the so-called Sheldon Adelson Primary; to court the casino billionaire who spent $92 million in a failed attempt to defeat Obama in 2012. Unlike Adelson, however, the Koch brothers are helping to build an enormous, sprawling, and unprecedented infrastructure not only to help elect Republicans, including a Republican president, but to try to rewrite the laws across the country.

[Boehlert is Senior Fellow, Media Matters for America]