The press is right to cover assiduously Hillary’s email controversy. And NOT right not to cover her important UN speech! See the fine piece here, which I found only after searching arduously for anything about the speech amid the clamor about the email: http://www.newsweek.com/hillary-clinton-two-front-war-312833
I must note, this brings up an unhappy memory. Twenty years ago, when Clinton gave her Beijing speech on the topic of women’s rights, I was ombudsman at the Washington Post. And I got a call from a staffer of Hillary’s– Lissa Muscatine, now an owner of the bookstore Politics and Prose in DC — saying that, while the coverage of the speech was terrific (and it was — noting that this was the first truly important foreign policy speech given by a First Lady), the paper had incorrectly printed accompanying excerpts from different remarks she had given that day, to a much smaller crowd, on abortion rights. Thus, the coverage touted the importance of the speech, and the printed remarks were from another address entirely.
I said I was sure the foreign desk would want to correct it, especially since the record would otherwise be wrong. She said she had already talked to them, and they had declined. Astonished, I talked to the foreign editor myself, and found him tenacioiusly resistant. Only after considerable back and forth did he reluctantly publish a “clarification,” not a correction. Such resistance to being fair about women’s words remains, clearly, today (as does that editor, at the Post — Jackson Diehl, now with the oped page.) This surely must change. It’s against the press’s own interest (not to mention the nation’s) to be so blind to fairness.
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