I want you to imagine this. A major newspaper has been covering the investigation of a steel plant manager accused of stalking another manager, hitting him over the head, and throwing his unconscious body into a molten furnace. There’s surveillance video of the crime, there’s a clear motive, and there’s evidence of premeditated intent. Moreover, there’s evidence that maybe the murderer had killed other people that way, that he’s a steel-mill serial killer. It’s a sensational crime, so of course it’s getting some coverage, not the least because the accused continues to deny that he did any of it, claiming that all the evidence is the result of a conspiracy by the company and the police, who are out to get him.
In the middle of this coverage, another story comes out. It turns out that a worker who died in the steel plant last year died because the company had been skipping basic maintenance on a mechanism in the steel cauldron. A small amount of molten metal tipped out when it shouldn’t have and killed the worker. The family is suing the company, and the district attorney is considering a charge of negligent homicide against the plant’s owner, who ordered the maintenance to be deferred despite warnings about the dangerous state of the tipping mechanism.
Wouldn’t you be dumbfounded if the major daily newspaper ran a story the next day about how the first-degree murder case was now in jeopardy because someone else died from molten metal in the steel plant at some point in the last year? Or that the serial killer’s case might be dropped because it turned out that OSHA had data showing that accidents involving molten steel had been a persistent problem in the industry for ten years? First-degree murder is first-degree murder. Deliberately stuffing corpses into molten metal is different than an accident. It’s why the justice system has different charges in the first place, so that there can be clarity about that difference.
And yet this seems to be the way that the story about classified documents being found in the offices and homes of government officials is being shaped now by major American news outlets, mostly notably “news analysis” in the New York Times. More than any major global newspaper, the New York Times repeatedly snaps back hard to a kind of extreme version of what it evidently takes to be the opposite of extremism: a kind of high-minded, pious and fundamentally phony version of “both sides do it” when it comes to misconduct by elected political leaders and their appointed staff.
Lacking insider knowledge of the people who make the call to cast events inside this frame, I’ve never been sure whether this is something they do for instrumental reasons, as a way to try and reassure both political parties that the Times editors can be reliable partners in the retention of power, or even as a power play to assert themselves as referees in politics, or whether it comes from a genuinely feeble simple-minded idealism that maintains that the rigid maintenance of absolute consistency is required in order to make moral claims.
Think back to my comparison: if a newspaper was that stupid about the steel-mill deaths and suggested that the accidental deaths called the murder case into question, maybe even seriously considering the murderer’s attempt to cry conspiracy, I don’t think there would be a public debate that then followed the contours of the newspaper’s suggestion. Everyone would just say “oh, come on”. But god help us, that’s what happens when the NYT decides to mainline their favorite addiction straight into the veins of the public sphere about stories like the classified documents scandals or Clinton’s emails.
This is the thing: the Times analysis acts as if it is an innocent bystander when they write, “they are similar enough that as a practical matter Democrats can no longer use the issue against Mr. Trump politically, and investigators may have a harder time prosecuting him criminally”. As if this is just the way it is, a natural occurrence like a snowstorm or tidal flooding. In substantial measure, the news coverage makes this real. Whether something is “similiar enough as a practical matter” is a question of perception, not empirical reality. And the media are the primary makers of perception in the formal public sphere.
God help us also if the Democrats decide to get high off that supply, because the easiest way to shut this all down is to insist on criminal proceedings as appropriate because the law has a provision for intention, severity and magnitude of misconduct—as well as for assigning specific individual culpability. Biden should just feed whomever managed his documents into the maw of the legal system (or let the special prosecutor do it). If that turns out to be him personally, ok. Feed Pence in. Feed Trump in. Go for it. Shut down the dumb back-and-forth. Let the clear differences between negligent carelessness and conscious, aggressive misconduct on a large scale shape what happens next.
And if on the other end of things, that requires greater clarity about declassification and records retention—and maybe less compulsive classification of routine communications—go for that too. After consequences for what was misconduct or law-breaking.
I think the most likely reason for this is not what you suggest, but that they want to resist what you say below: "In substantial measure, the news coverage makes this real." The desire to resist that (obviously true) fact comes from the implications: if news coverage makes politics go, than it's impossible to be an independent journalist in the way many of them want to be.