By Doug Livingston
Beacon Journal staff writer
A month before the November election, a Donald Trump supporter from Stow asked how I could so be so dismissive of the facts as a local reporter covering the national contest.
Hillary and Bill Clinton were killing adversaries by the dozens, Joann Jessie claimed.
“OK,” she wrote in a flurry of 27 emails, “you need to tell the truth about Hillary. … If Hillary wins, she will kill us all — hopefully not in blood.”
We met on a dreary Friday morning at her apartment. I asked her how she had uncovered allegations overlooked by mainstream media.
She sat down at her desktop computer, and with a blinking cursor in a search bar, typed “Clinton” and “murder” or “conspiracy” or “fraud.” The results reaffirmed her suspicion.
She printed and handed over a stack of false information, the kind that flummoxed political reporters and confused voters in 2016.
Readers like Jessie called and emailed us in high volume, alleging bias for not including contrived stories that supported their unwavering beliefs about a candidate.
The idea that the Clintons masterminded a grand conspiracy to kill scores of people had no foundation in fact.
Fake ‘Fight Club’ name for ‘reporter’
I leafed through other articles in the stack.
Tyler Durden was the author on a few of them. If you know movies, that’s the infamous character from the cult classic film Fight Club.
Bloomberg reported that there were three investment economists who posed as Tyler Durden for the website Zero Hedge and wrote pro-Russia, anti-Clinton material in addition to financial commentary.
“There’s a long history of Clinton-related body counts,” one of the Durdens blogged on Zero Hedge
Other authors lacked full names. Kosar is a “featured contributor” for The Political Insider, whose website says the mission statement is: “We break down the barriers employed by government and the liberal media to bring you the truth.”
What barriers might those be?
Kosar titled one article, “BOMBSHELL! Massive News About FBI Clinton MURDER Investigation,” alleging that documents linking Hillary Clinton to the death of a White House aide in 1992 had disappeared from the National Archives in 2016.
For proof, Kosar linked to a Daily Mail story. But, in truth, the conservative London newspaper only said there were FBI documents in the archives linking Clinton with Vince Foster’s death, which was ruled a suicide.
There’s more to raise questions about Kosar.
Just before the Ohio Primary, Kosar wrote that Trump received the endorsement of former Major League Baseball star Pete Rose of Cincinnati. He cited an MSNBC story pontificating on how the endorsement would play in battleground Ohio.
But again, in truth, the MSNBC story said the opposite. Rose never endorsed Trump, despite Trump jumping the gun on Twitter.
I chased a lot of wild geese supplied by Beacon Journal/Ohio.com readers from Stow to Cincinnati. People are real, and I respect the fact that they may have information I should know about. True or false, it influences their thinking and may be important to how I do my work.
This issue of who and what to trust is intensifying as we move toward Inauguration Day amidst rumors of Russian relationships.
Reporting on rumors and lies
So here’s a few question for readers: If I report facts debunking a rumor, does that give the rumor legs? What are facts? I lost sleep over such questions.
When I reported campaign statements as inaccurate or contradictory, some readers accused me of bias. But failure to do so can mislead, or even give credibility to absurdity.
An article by Paige Lavender, senior politics editor for the left-leaning Huffington Post, came up in Jessie’s search. Implicating Clinton in kidnapping based on no more than accusatory claims made by an adversary, it garnered more than two comments for each of the 166 words it took to write.
In it, New Jersey Gov. and Trump surrogate Chris Christie, speaking at the Republican National Convention, said hundreds of children in Africa were abducted because the U.S. State Department, under Clinton’s leadership, dragged its feet in labeling Boko Haram a terrorist group.
That’s all. No context. No fact checking. No rebuttal by team Clinton. No indication the author even sought balance.
Ninety minutes after Lavender published her online blurb, the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Casey Ross published a 311-word fact-checker linking to a Washington Post piece and declaring Christie’s claim as, at best, “half true.”
Context counts. Lavendar could have linked to a collection of Boko Haram stories the Huffington Post aggregated months earlier. She didn’t. And she hasn’t responded to an invitation to explain why.
Her misleading piece was shared 6,700 times and had 340 public comments. The contextual piece from the Plain Dealer got eight shares and, still, no comments.
Which one best served voters?
As the Stow woman and I continued through the Clinton stories, we found a list of clearly labeled conspiracies from over the years, compiled in the liberal news outlet, Mother Jones.
I said: “The story reads: ‘For entertainment purposes only.’ … The title includes the word ‘conspiracy.’ ”
Perhaps alone, Jessie said, the story shouldn’t be trusted. But in the soup of online attack pieces, it was good to reference.
Critical Trump fans
During the year, dozens of conservatives bent my ear. Only once did a reader, who supplied supporting court documents, tell me to go after the Republican.
Why so one-sided?
Mainstream journalists have internal checks that guard against favoritism. And when we make errors, we own them. But over the past 15-20 years, organizations purporting to be news outlets with no interest in balance or accuracy have proliferated, click by click.
To think that thousands of principled journalists would cover up murder for a presidential candidate dispels all hope for meaningful journalism.
But in this election, journalists who took extra time to ensure accuracy couldn’t compete with sensationalism.
Leaked Clinton Foundation documents failed to show illegalities. Trump supporters saw it differently. I was accused of bias for not representing their “truth.”
“Lock her up,” they chanted at a fourth-quarter rally in Cleveland, at which Trump received applause for mocking the media and saying he would sue women who accused him of sexual assault.
Should I have ignored the crowd’s chants or politicized threats from the podium?
Or should I have strived for balance and context: Clinton Foundation documents uncovered nothing illegal, but charitable tax returns from the Trump Foundation exposed an illegal campaign contribution and self-dealing.
Listening to readers’ pleas
Pleas to publish dirt on Clinton skyrocketed near the finish line.
I received two emails on Nov. 3.
Craig McCloud praised my coverage of a local Trump visit the day before. Then he pounced: “Where are all of the articles on Anthony Weiner’s email connected to Hillary?”
Yes, FBI Director James Comey had reopened an investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email server 11 days before the election. Duplicate email found on a computer used by a Clinton aide was titillating, but it offered nothing new, and the investigation was quickly closed.
What should be said about an investigation that found nothing new?
The second email came from Janis Seward, an Akron resident who accused the Akron Beacon Journal/Ohio.com of giving cover to the Clinton campaign by not giving prominent display to an Associated Press review of Clinton Foundation activities.
The documents were among those believed to have been hacked by Russians and released during the heat of the election.
“Withholding this kind of vital information from voters [days before the election] might be considered bias at the VERY least — and appears to make the ABJ complicit in pushing to elect someone emerging as a criminal,” Seward wrote.
“I’m not a beltway reporter,” I replied. “I’m not privy to the conversations reporters in Washington are having with sources close to the investigation. To report on what I know from my vantage point would be speculative at best. We will continue to monitor national news outlets and the Associated Press, which have talented and trusted reporters with a keen interest in this developing story.”
The Associated Press review, published on Page A6 of the Beacon Journal in late October, found nothing illegal, but raised ethical questions about former President Bill Clinton’s activities.
Between May and December, Seward fired off two dozen emails, not counting the exchanges that followed each. There were a few phone conversations, too. Between “nearly chok[ing] on [her] Cheerios” as she read our headlines, I listened.
As Seward criticized our photo selection and how far from the front page some stories landed, if they appeared at all, I asked editors that we double efforts to screen for even the appearance of bias in national reports.
As I tried to do with all readers, I respected Seward’s perspective. She says her husband subscribes to the Akron Beacon Journal for the crossword puzzle. Her daily examination of our work (sometimes offering feedback before sunrise) forced my evaluation of whether we were consistently fair.
Video controversy
And in the midst of this came two undercover recordings.
One was of Donald Trump talking about kissing, groping and trying to have sex with women. After its release, Trump confirmed its authenticity. His wife dismissed it as “locker room talk” taken out of context and made without knowing he was being recorded.
Another was by Project Veritas, a conservative operation that has previously produced highly edited videos casting Democrats, ACORN, Planned Parenthood and public officials in a bad light.
Among four videos released in the final weeks of the campaign, one suggested that Democrats were planting paid agitators at Trump rallies and looking for ways to deliver fraudulent votes.
Between the low-angle images, James O’Keefe of Project Veritas stared into a studio camera and told the viewers the meaning of what they had just seen.
O’Keefe’s track record of distorted or misleading reporting was well-documented. Subjects in his video protested that it was edited to misrepresent.
In my mind, the Project Veritas videos were under a dark cloud and would have far less impact than the groping video affirmed as authentic. With my plate full covering the campaign from Ohio, there was no time to duplicate the work of major national news outlets.
I alerted my editors to watch for the story on the wires. The Associated Press, our primary source of national news, provided the story that we published, and it provided the historical context of Project Veritas operations.
Meanwhile, Trump and his top surrogates, including his son, referenced the Project Veritas videos at rallies or on Twitter. Uploaded to YouTube in October, the videos received 6.3 million views, folding neatly into Trump’s narrative that the election was rigged, not least of all by the media.
“I do understand that you are not a beltway reporter,” Seward said in an email. “But there must be someone at the ABJ who picks and chooses articles from news sources and therein lies the opportunity for bias. The selection of what to put before the American public is really what is not balanced.”
For the record, in my newsroom, five people rotate into the role of selecting national wire stories. Their lists of stories are submitted at an evening meeting where about a dozen journalists who also monitor the wires and social media discuss the choices.
All at the table are trained to recognize our biases and entertain competing ideas.
Facts are evasive
Sometimes, though, just getting the basic facts is harder than readers probably know.
At that contentious Trump rally at the International Exposition Center in Cleveland, I noticed what looked like more cars in the parking lot than people at a Clinton rally across town the day before.
Trump accused the cameras of ignoring the size of the crowd, even as the cameras panned to capture them. “You’ll never show that,” a fan yelled as a camera man swung his camera across the audience.
I pulled out my phone and texted Trump campaign spokesman Seth Unger. I asked for a crowd count, which the Clinton campaign always gave, no matter how small. Unger said he’d look into it.
As Trump’s accusation that media wouldn’t report the crowd size rang in my ears, I waited for the answer.
None came.
Doug Livingston can be reached at 330-996-3792 or dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow on Twitter: @ABJDoug .