On August 23, the Associated Press pushed out a tweet on a hot story …
BREAKING: AP analysis: More than half those who met Clinton as Cabinet secretary gave money to Clinton Foundation.
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The thrust of the AP story was that those who wanted a meeting with Hillary Clinton during her term as secretary of state should start by making a donation to her foundation, a claim it boiled into what appeared to be a simple statistical analysis.
At least 85 of 154 people from private interests who met or had phone conversations scheduled with Clinton while she led the State Department donated to her family charity or pledged commitments to its international programs, according to a review of State Department calendars released so far to The Associated Press.
But those apparently precise numbers ignored the facts that:
The schedules that Braun and Sullivan had were incomplete, with detailed information representing only a portion of Hillary Clinton’s time in office.
The data was manipulated, throwing out any meeting they judged as having to do with someone who was part of the US government or a representative of a foreign government.
To find enough “donors” to generate the headline, they extended the list beyond direct donors to include employees of companies or charities that had donated.
If all of Hillary Clinton’s meetings were counted, or only direct donors were counted, then it would have become obvious that donors to the Clinton Foundation represented only a small fraction of those who visited her at the State Department—which would have made for a much less impressive headline.
Under criticism, the AP issued a defense of the article on August 24.
AP has been transparent in how it has reported this story. It focused on Mrs. Clinton’s meetings and calls involving people outside government who were not federal employees or foreign diplomats, because meeting with U.S. or foreign government officials would inherently have been part of her job as secretary of state.
The problem with this definition of the job of the secretary of state is that it’s utterly ridiculous. There is nothing in the role that suggests the secretary need meet with every foreign diplomat who makes a request. The limits to which this silliness was raised can be seen who the report considered “optional.”
But the AP’s defense of the article isn’t completely without merit, because it reveals one critical nugget of truth.
This reporting was done by the same AP investigative team that discovered Mrs. Clinton’s private email server and traced it to her basement in Chappaqua, New York, and whose reporting last week resulted in the resignation of Donald Trump’s top campaign strategist.
What it shows is an AP “investigative team” that had already been successful in sensationalizing one area of the Clinton campaign and a need for a new story—even if it had to be knitted from a whole cloth.
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The best sign that the AP was not only wrong, but knows that it’s wrong? From almost the moment that the article appeared, the Associated Press has refused to turn over the data used in making the “calculations.” Though limited amounts of information were provided in the original article and in followups, they repeatedly insisted that while the investigation “relied on publicly available data” they would not reveal the complete list of meetings that were included and those that were struck.
At the same time, David Fahrenthold was openly, methodically working through a list of items that he kept not just in public view, but invited the public to join him in analyzing that data.
The Associated Press kept their information hidden, rushed through the analysis, built a shaky case based on a deliberate mis-reading, and refused to share the information in a way that allowed anyone else to check their results.
A year later, that’s why Fahrenthold has the Pulitzer, and the AP is guilty of egregious misconduct.
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