Times Creates Sickening Equivalence Between Emails And Torture

A TPM post brought this item to my attention over the weekend and it pretty much encapsulates the problems that the media had in covering the election and does not bode well for how they will cover the Trump administration going forward. The NY Times had an article entitled “Trump Camp Refuses to Close Door on Campaign Pledge to ‘Lock Her Up'” which discusses the possibility that the Trump administration would still pursue Hillary Clinton even after this election. The fact that this is even a discussion is disturbing enough but the false equivalence in the Times article is even more shocking. According to the Times, “Chants of ‘lock her up’ became a frequent rallying cry at Trump campaign events, and Mr. Trump told Mrs. Clinton at the second presidential debate that if elected, he would instruct his attorney general ‘to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation because there has never been so many lies, so much deception.’ If he were president, he told her, ‘you’d be in jail.’ That threat unnerved both Republican and Democratic legal analysts. When Mr. Obama took office, he and his first attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., also faced a decision over whether to investigate the previous administration. While Mr. Holder said the country was owed ‘a reckoning’ for torture of terrorism suspects carried out after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Obama administration ultimately did not conduct a broad criminal investigation of officials from the Bush administration. Mr. Obama declared that ‘we need to look forward, as opposed to looking backwards.'”

Frankly, the New York Times taking the question of whether to prosecute people for torture which violated a number of our own laws as well as international treaties and the moral standing of this country and equating that with a decision to prosecute a former political opponent who has never been charged with a crime is simply sickening. And it is a classic example of the false equivalence in the media that helped elect Donald Trump and is apparently continuing even after his appalling election. And it should make us all fear for our democracy.