Time after time, Mrs. Clinton passed up the opportunity to correct Mr. Trump on his misstatements and his frequent stretching of the truth.An example?
In a typical exchange, Mrs. Clinton tried to refute Mr. Trump as he boasted of how he would have the greatest tax plan since Ronald Reagan. “That can’t be left to stand,” she said. “I kind of assumed there would be a lot of these charges and claims.”You'd never know from Peters's description that Clinton actually did refute Trump, or that any haste or lack of completeness in her refutation resulted not only from Trump's hectoring but from Lester Holt making one of his rare efforts to actually play moderator.
But Mr. Trump quickly cut her off. “Facts,” he said. The conversation quickly moved on.
Trump evoked Reagan, said his plan would be full of tax cuts and deregulation, and asserted that Clinton's plan would raise taxes and increase regulations. Here's what happened after that:
HOLT: Let me get you to pause right there, because we're going to move into -- we're going to move into the next segment. We're going to talk taxes...(Emphasis added.)
CLINTON: That can't -- that can't be left to stand.
HOLT: Please just take 30 seconds and then we're going to go on.
CLINTON: I kind of assumed that there would be a lot of these charges and claims, and so...
TRUMP: Facts.
CLINTON: So we have taken the home page of my website, HillaryClinton.com, and we've turned it into a fact-checker. So if you want to see in real-time what the facts are, please go and take a look. Because what I have proposed...
TRUMP: And take a look at mine, also, and you'll see.
CLINTON: ... would not add a penny to the debt, and your plans would add $5 trillion to the debt. What I have proposed would cut regulations and streamline them for small businesses. What I have proposed would be paid for by raising taxes on the wealthy, because they have made all the gains in the economy. And I think it's time that the wealthy and corporations paid their fair share to support this country.
So she did refute him -- just not hard enough to satisfy Peters.
Oh, but this is my favorite Peters assertion:
There were times he made up his own facts. And Mrs. Clinton did not take the opportunities she had to prove him wrong.Did you follow that? Peters is chastising Clinton because she didn't rebut Trump's assertions about crime in New York City after she'd already rebutted them. In other words, as far as Peters was concerned, it wasn't enough that Clinton asserted that the murder rate in New York City is down -- it didn't count as a rebuttal because she didn't say it twice.
She could have corrected Mr. Trump after he interrupted her to falsely claim that she was inaccurate in saying that murders in New York City were down.
Here's the exchange:
TRUMP: ... in New York City, stop-and-frisk, we had 2,200 murders, and stop-and-frisk brought it down to 500 murders. Five hundred murders is a lot of murders. It's hard to believe, 500 is like supposed to be good?She said it. He said she was wrong. She said, "No, I'm not." What else was she supposed to do after that?Recite all the incident-level data from memory? I'm not clear on where she fell short.
But we went from 2,200 to 500. And it was continued on by Mayor Bloomberg. And it was terminated by current mayor. But stop-and- frisk had a tremendous impact on the safety of New York City. Tremendous beyond belief. So when you say it has no impact, it really did. It had a very, very big impact.
CLINTON: Well, it's also fair to say, if we're going to talk about mayors, that under the current mayor, crime has continued to drop, including murders. So there is...
TRUMP: No, you're wrong. You're wrong.
CLINTON: No, I'm not.
TRUMP: Murders are up. All right. You check it.
Incidentally, this was fact-checked in real time by the NYPD:
Moments after Trump speaks on stop-and-frisk, NYPD spokesman tweets this. #debatenight pic.twitter.com/HqXf9JLOq2
— NBC Nightly News (@NBCNightlyNews) September 27, 2016
But Clinton failed, as far as Peters is concerned, because she didn't hector Trump into a state of abject submission. Sorry, but that wasn't her job. She did more than enough last night.
8 comments:
oh for Pete's sakes. The times has become the judge from East Germany gives the American diver a 6 when everybody else had 9 or 9.5
The NYT has been openly slandering HRC since before the start of the Presidential campaign. I guess they're trying to show that they're not taking the Democratic side automatically but it is just making them look like liars for no good reason.
Can you name any police associations who are supporting Clinton, well, other than, possibly, honorary minority-dominated police associations?
Clinton was smart not to play whack-a-mole with Trump's lies. She shot down most of the really important ones, but focused on what she needed to say instead of letting herself be driven by what Trump said.
And no, KenRight, I'm not aware of any white-dominated police unions that are backing Clinton. But that's not exactly a negative.
If she had been more forceful in reciting his lies he'd have said she was "shrill" or "unlikable" or "bitchy." She can't win with the media no matter what she does.
Well done. I do read the NYTimes every day, I have done for most of my literate life, it was always in my house. This guy Peters does not ring a bell though, I don't know who he is.
What's undeniably true is that the NYT has had an institutional loathing towards the Clintons for over twenty years. It's been bizarre to watch in real time, they cannot ever catch a break from that paper. I know they endorsed Hillary, but that does not change their couple of decades of monstrous and shitty reporting on the Clintons. A right wing newspaper from Arkansas could not have been as venomous as the NY Times has been.
I'm inclined to blame the story in question not on a New York Times institutional bias, but on shitty reporting. To be fair, Peters was under the gun, things were getting said fast, that that onslaught of words can lead to errors. Reporters today are not only up against incredibly tight deadlines, but like those vacuum cleaners that beat while they swept while they cleaned, Peters had to collect quotes while he wrote while probably he also had to tweet. Try it sometime.
Nevertheless, a truly great reporter — if there are any left these days — wouldn't have made those mistakes.
Oh, and what about his editors? Well, in the days when a reporter like the late Peter Khiss would have a team of a half dozen eager young guys in rep ties and button down shirts fanning the streets, each meticulously gathering one fact or nugget for one of Kiss's stories, there were also plenty of editors who could also fact check the copy.
These days there are fewer reporters, fewer editors and (alas) fewer readers. Not to mention fewer advertisers to support the huge staffs that did all this meticulous reporting half a century ago.
Be thankful there's still a New York Times. In other cities, two bums in a newsroom are ripping stuff off the wires and slapping it into the paper while the skeletonized local reporting staff huffs and puffs to report on arrests at the cop shop, while they blog, while they tweet while they make sure their resumés are up to date.
We, the entire damn society, have all been interrupted, and there's not much I can see that we can do about it, save stand around the musicians playing Nearer My God To Thee as the great ship of civilization sinks beneath the digital waves.
Yours very crankily,
The New York Crank
I am.
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