Emailgate: How media mistakes created Hillary Clinton's fake, fake identity
Summary:The media creates mythology. David Gewirtz looks at how the AP created a new, completely false Hillary Clinton myth about a fake identity, how it's sticking, and where it all went wrong.
There is more to the Hillary Clinton personal email story than just Hillary Clinton and her personal email use.
It's also a story about a trusted news establishment that broke a story in the morning about the leading presumptive presidential candidate using a fake identity, let it run through an entire day's news cycle, and then changed that story in the same article later that evening -- without ever releasing an update or correction.
What I'm about to describe is how the media can create its own misinformation, resulting in an entirely new (and incorrect) mythology. The result: leaving an already overly partisan citizenry with an impression of an odd Clinton misdeed that is, in fact, wholly false.
UPDATE 3/10/2015: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressed email concerns in a statement followed by a question and answer segment with the press. We have the full video, plus analysis of her comments. Read Hillary Clinton: Yes, I did operate a private server.
It started with an Associated Press report claiming that Mrs. Clinton (or, presumably, a staffer) "ran her own computer system for her official emails" out of her family's home in Chappaqua, New York.
At 8:09 AM ET, AP ran a story headlined "CLINTON RAN OWN COMPUTER SYSTEM FOR HER OFFICIAL EMAILS." In it, AP not only asserted that Clinton ran a server, but also that she used a fake identity, one "Eric Hoteham" to register the domain name.
Later, AP changed the story quite a bit. When my editor and I went back to the same AP URL later in the day to do a proof edit of my Hillary Clinton email coverage, the AP story was quite different. Now the headline was "HOUSE COMMITTEE SUBPOENAS CLINTON EMAILS IN BENGHAZI PROBE."
Eric Hoteham was no longer a sock puppet, but instead a typo. Even so, the damage was done.
We all update stories. I've done it relatively often myself. When I do, I mark where in the article I've changed the story, and indicate that the story was updated. Where AP went wrong is it didn't mention the story had been updated and just let this new fake identity narrative take hold.
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Emailgate: How media mistakes created Hillary Clinton's fake, fake identity