Does this sound familiar?
Hillary Clinton, in a rare interview on Fox News last Sunday, claimed that the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey Jr., had called her statements about her private email servers “truthful” and said she has been consistent with the American people in her accounts about the controversy. As it turns out, Clinton’s contentions in the interview were misleading, bordering on false.
If you’re getting all your political news from The New York Times, this may be the first time you’re hearing this. Clinton’s remarks were covered by several major news organizations, several of which pointedly challenged the Democratic nominee’s candor. But nothing on the interview ever appeared in The Times, either online or in print.
In the Fox appearance, Clinton was asked by Chris Wallace, the anchor, about previous statements she’s made when questioned on the email controversy, while he played tapes of her past remarks to the public.
“After a long investigation, F.B.I. Director James Comey said none of those things that you told the American public were true,” Wallace said.
Clinton pushed back. “Director Comey said my answers were truthful, and what I’ve said is consistent with what I have told the American people: that there were decisions discussed and made to classify retroactively certain of the emails,” she said.
The Washington Post, NPR, USA Today* and PolitiFact all challenged Clinton’s claims, saying they appeared to be based on a selective and misleading interpretation of Comey’s remarks. The Post awarded her “Four Pinocchios,” the worst truth-telling rating it gives, for statements it classifies as “Whoppers.”
For a candidate who had just emerged from a sharply choreographed convention, with a solid bounce in the polls, it was surprising that Clinton would prominently stumble over the email servers again, and on Fox. It was clearly news.
I asked Carolyn Ryan, The Times’s political editor, about the decision not to cover Clinton’s remarks about the email controversy. Here’s how she responded: “It is a subject we have covered aggressively — especially how her comments compare to what the F.B.I. found — and will continue to do so.”
Indeed The Times has been aggressive in its coverage of the email servers, both in digging up news and analyzing the fallout. The Clinton interview may have felt like more of the same, especially coming as it did on the same day Trump made a flip remark about a Muslim couple who lost their son in Iraq and appeared at the Democratic convention.
The Trump story is what captured the headlines, and quite rightly. His insensitive attempt to undercut the couple even drew lashings from members of his own party. The Times called the controversy between Trump and the couple, “an unexpected and potentially pivotal flash point in the general election.”
It’s hard to tell whether that will prove true. What seems less arguable is that Clinton, like Trump, is a historically unpopular figure, and a small but critical block of voters is still looking for information that might help them answer two questions: Is Trump a reckless bully with no sense of decency and poor judgment? And is Clinton someone Americans can really trust?
As the general election unfolds, it’s essential that whatever doubts linger about the candidates, these voters believe that The Times will give them the information they need to answer those questions.
*An earlier version of this post misidentified one of the news organizations that fact-checked Hillary Clinton’s interview with Fox. It was USA Today, not NBC News.