Subject: ​Correct The Record Thursday September 18, 2014 Afternoon Roundup
From: Burns Strider <[email-masked]>
To: CTRFriendsFamily <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 14:07:52 -0400
List-Id: <CTRFriendsFamily.americanbridge.org>

*​**Correct The Record Thursday September 18, 2014 Afternoon Roundup:*

*Tweets:*

*Correct The Record* @CorrectRecord: "Isolationists vs. Interventionists:
The Latest GOP Split" via @billburton <https://twitter.com/billburton>
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2014/09/18/isolationists-vs-interventionists-the-latest-gop-split/
…
<http://t.co/67BNwZxrYV> [9/18/14, 1:07 p.m. EDT
<https://twitter.com/CorrectRecord/status/512649050470895616>]

*Correct The Record* @CorrectRecord: .@shellyporges
<https://twitter.com/shellyporges> says we should "do more to make every
day equal for women everywhere." #Progress4Women
<https://twitter.com/hashtag/Progress4Women?src=hash>
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102012957  <http://t.co/IPBKeyCr97>[9/18/14, 12:41
p.m. EDT <https://twitter.com/CorrectRecord/status/512642675984826368>]

*Correct The Record* @CorrectRecord: HRC “has devoted her life to expanding
opportunities for ‘We the People’" in US and globally #HRC365
<https://twitter.com/hashtag/HRC365?src=hash> #ConstitutionDay
<https://twitter.com/hashtag/ConstitutionDay?src=hash>
http://bit.ly/1iWmKLf  <http://t.co/oWAF255rud>[9/17/14, 3:41 p.m. EDT
<https://twitter.com/CorrectRecord/status/512325493610541056>]

*Headlines:*

*CNBC opinion: Shelly Porges: “Empowering women is good for the economy”
<http://www.cnbc.com/id/102012957>*

“The United States recently celebrated Women's Equality Day — let's do more
to make every day equal for women everywhere. As Hillary Clinton says, ‘it
is the great unfinished business of the 21st century.’”

*Wall Street Journal op-ed: Bill Burton: “Isolationists vs.
Interventionists: The Latest GOP Split”
<http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2014/09/18/isolationists-vs-interventionists-the-latest-gop-split/>*

“In attacking Hillary Clinton on foreign policy, Republican Sens. Rand Paul
and Marco Rubio are doing a pretty good job of underscoring their own
differences on isolation versus interventionism.”

*Associated Press: “Clinton: Turn Female Economic Issues Into Movement”
<http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_HILLARY_CLINTON?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT>*

“Hillary Rodham Clinton says voters should turn pay inequity and women's
financial security into a political movement this fall.

*NBC News: “Hillary Clinton: Congress Out of Touch on Women's Issues”
<http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/hillary-clinton/hillary-clinton-congress-out-touch-womens-issues-n206446>*

“Congress is living in an ‘evidence-free zone’ as it debates issues of
equal pay and family-friendly work policies, former Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton said Thursday.”

*MSNBC: “Conservatives demand Clinton subpoena on Benghazi”
<http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/conservatives-demand-clinton-subpoena-benghazi>*

“Less than a day after the House Select Committee on Benghazi held its
first hearing, pressure is already mounting on its chairman to subpoena
Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state during the 2012 terror attack
and is considering a presidential run in 2016.”

*CNN: Hambycast: “Hillary Clinton's madcap media mob”
<http://edition.cnn.com/2014/09/18/politics/hambycast-iowa-hillary-clinton/index.html?hpt=hp_c2>*

“If Hillary Clinton decides not to run for president -- and yes, that is
still possible -- her return to the media lion's den might be a factor in
her thinking.”

*Vox: “Why Joe Biden trails Hillary Clinton by 44 points”
<http://www.vox.com/2014/9/18/6354359/joe-biden-hillary-clinton-2016>*

“Though Biden's always been known as a great speaker, he needs to learn to
talk to a different party than the one he grew up in.”

*Washington Post blog: Erik Wemple: “Sharyl Attkisson just can’t stop
sliming former employer CBS News”
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2014/09/18/sharyl-attkisson-just-cant-stop-sliming-former-employer-cbs-news/>*

“Conspiracy, meet theory. Too bad Attkisson’s very own experience
contradicts it.”

*Politico blog: Dylan Byers on Media: “AP's Peoples to cover Republican
2016 field”
<http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2014/09/aps-peoples-to-cover-republican-field-195711.html>*

“The Associated Press has tapped Steve Peoples, its northeast political
reporter, to cover the field of Republican presidential hopefuls in 2016,
political editor David Scott announced in a memo to staff on Tuesday.”

*Articles:*

*CNBC opinion: Shelly Porges: “Empowering women is good for the economy”
<http://www.cnbc.com/id/102012957>*

By Shelly Porges

September 18, 2014

Last month, the Gujarat state government in India instituted a two-week
celebration on the empowerment of women. The celebration quickly subsided
when the police took actions more reminiscent of female oppression than
empowerment, putting up posters with women dressed in jeans and shorts that
read "Do not step out of the house in inappropriate clothing" and urging
girls to refrain from using cell phones for no reason whatsoever.

Across the world's economies, women face all kinds of barriers to their
empowerment. Two decades after Hillary Clinton's 1994 speech in Beijing
where she so famously declared that "women's rights are human rights," the
fight continues.

But empowering women is not just the right thing to do. It's the smart
thing to do.

This week, powerhouse leaders including Hillary Clinton, House Minority
Leader Nancy Pelosi, and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand will come together at a
Center for American Progress roundtable to continue the dialogue on women's
economic security and empowerment.

Women are an extremely powerful resource for global entrepreneurship and
economic development — one that is not currently tapped to its potential.
Research has shown that where women are economically empowered, communities
and nations thrive.

That is why over the past few years, the conversation has developed into
empowering women economically. In 2011, for example, the State Department
held the first Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Women and the
Economy Summit, a breakthrough forum in San Francisco on the economic
empowerment of women where we hosted 21 of the world's economies —
including China, Russia, and Indonesia — that represented 55 percent of the
world's GDP.

At the forum, Secretary Clinton persuaded the countries to agree to the
"San Francisco Declaration" — an agenda to integrate female economic
empowerment and entrepreneurship into their economic policies. It declared
that the countries "will take concrete actions to realize the full
potential of women, integrate them more fully into APEC economies, harness
their talents, remove barriers that restrict women's full economic
participation, and maximize their contributions towards economic growth."

This was a monumental breakthrough for many of the economies and for the
United States, and is just one example of the enormous strides that have
been made. But there is more to be done to continue to increase
opportunities for women entrepreneurs and to raise their profile to the
highest levels.

Each of us can also do our part by:

   - Purchasing goods or services from women-owned businesses locally and
   around the world;
   - Supporting organizations that assist women entrepreneurs; and
   - Joining angel investment groups like Golden Seeds that invest in
   women-founded and led enterprises.

The United States recently celebrated Women's Equality Day — let's do more
to make every day equal for women everywhere. As Hillary Clinton says, "it
is the great unfinished business of the 21st century."

*Wall Street Journal op-ed: Bill Burton: “Isolationists vs.
Interventionists: The Latest GOP Split”
<http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2014/09/18/isolationists-vs-interventionists-the-latest-gop-split/>*

By Bill Burton, executive vice president and managing director at the
Global Strategy Group and a senior fellow at the Center for American
Progress

September 18, 2014, 11:22 a.m. EDT

In attacking Hillary Clinton on foreign policy, Republican Sens. Rand Paul
and Marco Rubio are doing a pretty good job of underscoring their own
differences on isolation versus interventionism. In their estimation, one
stance or the other accounts for the rise of Islamic State militants, and
either way, Mrs. Clinton is to blame.

Huh?

Mr. Rubio wrote an op-ed recently attacking Mrs. Clinton for being an
“isolationist” when it comes to foreign policy. He accuses her of paving
the way for the rise of Islamic State by not arming the moderate Syrian
opposition.

Mr. Rubio is completely wrong. Mrs. Clinton did in fact advocate for arming
the moderate Syrian opposition in order to prevent extremists from taking
control. But why take my word for it when his colleague is already pointing
out that truth?

In an op-ed a few weeks ago, Mr. Paul said the exact opposite of Sen.
Rubio, labeling Mrs. Clinton an “interventionist,” and asserting that
arming the moderate Syrian opposition would have “created a haven for the
Islamic State.”

You don’t have to read that closely between the lines to see that their
attacks weren’t only aimed at their straw woman du jour but also at each
other. Talk about an elephant in the room.

According to Mr. Rubio, “Members of my own Republican Party have also at
times embraced the Democrats’ narrative that too much American leadership
is the problem, rather than the solution to global instability. Not too
long ago, some neo-isolationists even claimed that America has no
significant national interest in the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, and that
American support for the Syrian opposition fueled the growth of the Islamic
State.” Hmm, I wonder who he’s talking about?

Mr. Paul didn’t hold back either in his criticism of the likes of Mr.
Rubio: “But the same is true of hawkish members of my own party. Some said
it would be ‘catastrophic’ if we failed to strike Syria. What they were
advocating for then—striking down Assad’s regime—would have made our
current situation even worse, as it would have eliminated the only regional
counterweight to the ISI[L] threat.”

Regardless of whether the Isolationists or the Interventionists prevail in
the GOP civil war, one thing is for sure: The Republican Party is divided
more than ever. And, I will remain hopeful that somehow, someday,
Republicans will get their act together, join in finding solutions and stop
the nonsense and silliness that helps no one.

*Associated Press: “Clinton: Turn Female Economic Issues Into Movement”
<http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_HILLARY_CLINTON?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT>*

By Ken Thomas

September 18, 2014

Hillary Rodham Clinton says voters should turn pay inequity and women's
financial security into a political movement this fall.

Clinton says issues like raising the minimum wage, equal pay and providing
affordable child care need to be "in the lifeblood" of the upcoming
elections.

The former secretary of state is a potential 2016 Democratic presidential
candidate. She spoke at a forum sponsored by the Center for American
Progress along with House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and Sens. Kirsten
Gillibrand of New York and Patty Murray of Washington state.

Democrats are trying to persuade women to vote in the fall midterm
elections as they work to keep their Senate majority. Female voters could
hold the key in several competitive Senate races.

*NBC News: “Hillary Clinton: Congress Out of Touch on Women's Issues”
<http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/hillary-clinton/hillary-clinton-congress-out-touch-womens-issues-n206446>*

By Kasie Hunt

September 18, 2014, 1:14 p.m. EDT

Congress is living in an "evidence-free zone" as it debates issues of equal
pay and family-friendly work policies, former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton said Thursday.

"Unfortunately, reality is not always the context in which these decisions
are made. The Congress increasingly -- despite the best efforts of my
friends and others -- is living in an evidence-free zone," she said during
a roundtable discussion at the Center for American Progress focused on
women's issues. "What the reality is, in the lives of Americans is so far
from the minds of too many who don't place the highest priority" on those
issues.

Women are a critical demographic in this year's midterm elections, with
Democrats focused on stoking the gender gap particularly in key states like
North Carolina and Colorado. Clinton has focused much of her career as
first lady, senator and then Secretary of State on issues affecting women
and girls.

Clinton made the remarks during a roundtable that also featured Democratic
Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Patty Murray, House Minority Leader Nancy
Pelosi, and Rep. Rosa DeLauro. The potential 2016 presidential candidate
said that the glass ceiling isn't the problem for most American women.

"The floor is collapsing--we talk about a glass ceiling? These women don't
even have a secure floor under them," Clinton said.

*MSNBC: “Conservatives demand Clinton subpoena on Benghazi”
<http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/conservatives-demand-clinton-subpoena-benghazi>*

By Alex Seitz-Wald

September 18, 2014, 11:31 a.m. EDT

Less than a day after the House Select Committee on Benghazi held its first
hearing, pressure is already mounting on its chairman to subpoena Hillary
Clinton, who was secretary of state during the 2012 terror attack and is
considering a presidential run in 2016.

On Thursday morning, the anti-Clinton Stop Hillary PAC delivered to South
Carolina Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy more than 120,000 signatures from
supporters who want the former first lady to testify under oath, a day
after the same group started running $100,000 worth of advertising
attacking Clinton on Benghazi in key presidential states.

The petition is in the form of a faux subpoena, issued to Clinton, from
Stop Hillary PAC’s Honorary Chairman Ted Harvey. “On behalf of the AMERICAN
PEOPLE,” Harvey, a Colorado state senator, writes, “This subpoena is issued
by the undersigned citizens in support for Rep. Trey Gowdy and the Benghazi
Select Committee. You MUST agree to appear [under oath],” the letter states.

That’s on top of another roughly 98,000 signatures on a petition from the
group supporting Gowdy, which were also deliveredThursday.

“Over the past few months 264,220 supporters from across the country have
signed our petition to subpoena Hillary to testify so the truth can be
uncovered,” Harvey said in a statement to msnbc.

Garrett Marquis, the group’s spokesperson noted that the Stop Hillary PAC
was the first anti-Hillary PAC to file with the Federal Elections
Commission. “We are the leaders in the movement to stop Hillary from
becoming President,” he said. The group has raised about $1 million and
signed up almost 600,000 Americans.

On Tuesday, the super PAC began airing some of the earliest Clinton-themed
ads yet, demanding that Clinton testify under oath.

The petitions arrived at the Longworth House Office Building Thursday morning
in five boxes holding more than 20,000 pages of printed out petitions.

Security protocols would not allow the boxes to be delivered directly to
Gowdy’s office, however, so Marquis presented a staffer with two
representative petitions and sent the boxes off to be screened by Capitol
Police. They’ll be delivered to the chairman’s office about two weeks
later, after clearing screening.

*CNN: Hambycast: “Hillary Clinton's madcap media mob”
<http://edition.cnn.com/2014/09/18/politics/hambycast-iowa-hillary-clinton/index.html?hpt=hp_c2>*

By Peter Hamby

September 18, 2014

Des Moines, Iowa (CNN) -- If Hillary Clinton decides not to run for
president -- and yes, that is still possible -- her return to the media
lion's den might be a factor in her thinking.

She's done a national book tour and the paid lecture circuit, but Clinton
got an up-close look at today's frenzied political news environment last
weekend when she visited Iowa for the first time in seven years, a
spectacle primed for an avalanche of media coverage given her expected
campaign and her tortured history with the Hawkeye State.

I joined more than 200 other reporters who swarmed the scene and tweeted
away, even though most Americans on social media that day probably cared
more about Robert Griffin's ankle.

The press scrum that assembled to witness noncandidates Hillary and Bill
Clinton flip Hy-Vee steaks with Sen. Tom Harkin -- behind a barricade, of
course -- was as large, if not larger, than the media hordes that covered
her at the height of her 2008 campaign.

One reporter got whacked in the head with the butt of a big television
camera. Another photographer dramatically toppled off his ladder while
straining to get a shot. It was a little absurd. When the Clintons
approached the media zoo for question time, Bill Clinton leaned in and
relished the scene. Hillary kept her distance.

Political Twitter, though, wasn't just a stream of gauzy Instagram-filtered
pics of the Clintons: It was also rife with media criticism, some fair and
some not, from politicos and press critics who pointed to the event as
another example of lazy "pack journalism" with little journalistic upside.

The sniping had some credibility. What was the competitive advantage of
being there, just one more reporter among the herd, all of us racing around
to get the same quotes and the same pictures?

This was especially true for the many journalists in attendance who rarely
travel outside of Washington or New York to cover politics but decided to
open up their travel budget for this one trip.

Couldn't their time have been better spent reporting on an undercovered
Senate or governor's race in some other part of the country, far away from
the rest of the media scrum? Of course, the academics would say. But the
incentive structure of today's click-driven news economy begs to differ.
Hillary gets eyeballs. Arkansas' Tom Cotton does not. This is the world we
live in.

As much as I believe in straying far, far away from the rest of the media
pack -- this was a lynchpin argument in "Did Twitter Kill The Boys on the
Bus?," the Harvard Kennedy School study I wrote last year about the
hyperactive political news media -- I did find value in covering the Steak
Fry.

For one, I lived Clinton's 2008 campaign up close as an embedded producer
for CNN, living on her campaign plane for six months and ingesting every
single stump speech, gaffe and gross turkey sandwich in front of me. It was
useful for me to see whether her political skills and her willingness to
play the Iowa game had shifted since she lost the nomination fight to
Barack Obama.

The whole thing was broadcast on CNN and C-SPAN, which is fine and good,
but television cameras don't pick up the small things reporters can sniff
on the ground: The receptiveness of the crowd, the impressive
organizational prowess of the once-meager Ready for Hillary super PAC, the
absurdity of the staged photo-ops and press scrums, and the rope-line body
language of Clinton herself, which was noticeably more cautious than her
husband Bill (some things never change).

Those are the kind of atmospherics I chose to focus on when crafting my
report from the scene as well as this week's episode of Hambycast.

And of course, there's the reporting that went on nowhere near the Steak
Fry, those meetings with Democrat and Republican sources in and around Des
Moines. Was all that worth the plane ticket to DSM? Definitely. Will I go
somewhere where other reporters aren't for my next trip? You bet.

Watching the Iowa theatrics from afar, the journalist Dave Weigel wrote
that Hillary's protocandidacy is a "problem for the media, which
simultaneously is ready right now to cover her like a nominee -- 200
reporters! -- and yet so palpably bored with how she talks, and runs."

But the ever-growing press corps, weaponized by Twitter, will also be a
problem for Clinton and her team, who must find ways of engaging with a
massive entourage of reporters that is constantly on the hunt for "news" --
i.e., anything off-message or click-worthy -- while also trying to drive
the conversation on their own terms.

The hyperguarded Mitt Romney encountered this same dilemma during his
ill-fated 2012 presidential bid.

When he avoided the press, he got punished by a cranky and access-starved
press corps. When he held a rare press conference to push a policy idea,
his comments were drowned out by a cacophony of horse-race questions or
some Twitter-driven "controversy" unfolding hundreds of miles away.

So he chose to get his message out on his own terms, through paid media or
friendly Fox News interviews, without the filter of the "traditional"
press, whatever that means. In the end, it wasn't enough.

That political reporters are motivated by conflict, personality and the
ups-and-downs of a campaign is nothing new, and it's unlikely to change
despite carping from media critics.

What has changed is the atomized and hyperactive social news environment we
all live in now, and it's changed dramatically since Clinton last announced
a presidential bid in 2007, before the iPhone existed and well before
Twitter took hold among the political class.

If she runs again, there will be reporters covering her campaign who were
barely in diapers when Bill Clinton was elected President, who came of age
in an era of Internet journalism that prizes exclusives and micronews, who
have very different incentives than the television and newspaper reporters
that the Clintons dealt with during his presidency or her last campaign.
They hold the Clintons in high-regard, but not nearly as high as the regard
the Clintons have for themselves.

Hillary got a taste of this during her book tour -- her de-facto re-entry
into political life -- when various comments that had even a whiff of
controversy or gaffe-status rocketed across the Internet at warp speed,
with an assist from Republican opposition researchers.

Life as a candidate, of course, is something much different. Clinton knows
this. But her Iowa pop-in was her first glimpse of the thorny new reality
that awaits.

*Vox: “Why Joe Biden trails Hillary Clinton by 44 points”
<http://www.vox.com/2014/9/18/6354359/joe-biden-hillary-clinton-2016>*

By Ezra Klein

September 18, 2014, 11:20 a.m. EDT

By most measures, Joe Biden has been a damn good vice president. When
President Barack Obama wanted to make sure stimulus money didn't disappear
to fraud, he turned to Biden — "nobody messes with Joe," he said — and
Biden succeeded. When the White House wanted to avoid the fiscal cliff, it
was Biden who closed the deal with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. When
Obama flubbed the first debate against Mitt Romney, it was Biden who
restored the ticket's mojo by bullying his way past Rep. Paul Ryan. When
the Democrats held their 2012 convention, it was Biden's speech that pulled
the highest ratings — beating both Bill Clinton and Obama.

Biden's most off-the-reservation moment, meanwhile, is the kind of thing
that should help him in 2016. He pushed the Obama administration to embrace
gay marriage before it was quite ready. At the time, it looked like a
gaffe. Now it looks prescient.

But what I wrote of Biden in January 2013 is still true today. "In the
continuing drama that is the Obama presidency, Biden often appears as comic
relief. He's the zany neighbor, the adorable uncle. As a result, his
presidential ambitions, which burn brightly even today, have mostly been
laughed off. Somehow, the sitting vice president of the United States, the
former chairman of both the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the
Senate Judiciary Committee, a man who's on a nickname basis with many of
the world's most powerful leaders, is seen in many quarters as lacking the
gravitas to be president."

Or, to put it into numbers, according to Real Clear Politics' average of
polls, Biden is running 44 points behind Hillary Clinton for the Democratic
nomination in 2016 — and only one point ahead of Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

This week has been a reminder why. First, Biden angered Jewish groups by
referring to shady lenders as "shylocks." Then he called Singapore's Lee
Kuan Yew "the wisest man in the Orient." Biden has history of this kind of
thing. In 2006, he said, "you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts
unless you have a slight Indian accent." In 2007, he called Obama "the
first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean
and a nice-looking guy." Biden, New York Magazine snarked, "is your
accidentally racist grandma."

I have a theory on why these kinds of gaffes have hurt Biden so badly. (To
be perfectly honest, I am not anywhere near sure it is correct.) I don't
believe it's that people think Biden is so undisciplined that he can't be
trusted with high-stakes diplomacy or late-night negotiations. Biden is
doing that work now, he's been doing that work for a long time, and no one
in the Obama administration or, from what I can tell, in the media, seems
to think Biden incompetent or reckless.

Rather, these comments keep exposing a cultural gulf between Biden and the
party he seeks to lead. Biden is an old-school, white, male politician in a
party that's increasingly young, multicultural, and female. One of the
biggest frustration for Team Biden is that their boss has become something
of a joke on the internet — and that's partly because the people driving
opinion online are young and very sensitive to the particular kind of
gaffes Biden keeps making.

One of Obama's great strengths as a politician has been his recognition of
the power of the younger, more multicultural, more digital wing of the
modern Democratic Party — and his ability to forge a deep cultural
connection with them. Biden's problem is that even if they like him,
there's no authentic connection. The way he goes viral is by making them
LOL.

This isn't just an age thing. Biden isn't much older than Clinton, but
she's been more adept at signaling cultural affinity with young Democrats
than he's been (though she's occasionally struggled too, most notably in
her interview with Terry Gross on gay marriage). Even her memes are better.

I don't know exactly how Biden fixes this or even if he can. Clinton isn't
inevitable, and Biden should, by all rights, pose a real threat to her.
But, though Biden's always been known as a great speaker, he needs to learn
to talk to a different party than the one he grew up in.

*Washington Post blog: Erik Wemple: “Sharyl Attkisson just can’t stop
sliming former employer CBS News”
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2014/09/18/sharyl-attkisson-just-cant-stop-sliming-former-employer-cbs-news/>*

By Erik Wemple

September 18, 2014, 12:43 p.m. EDT

Sharyl Attkisson’s resignation from the position of investigative
correspondent at CBS News took place in March. The high-profile newswoman
used the media interest in her departure to repeatedly tar her former
colleagues as cowards — journalists afraid to upset those in power. Here’s
one of the quotes from the media tour: “With various stories, you do get
the idea at some point that they [CBS News] want you to stop, especially if
you start to dig down right into something very, very important, and it’s
not just with political stories – it’s with stories that go after other
interests, corporations, different things.”

The tour, alas, isn’t over.

In an interview yesterday with NewsMaxTV’s “Steve Malzberg Show,” Attkisson
chatted about her latest story for the Daily Signal, a site “supported by
the resources and intellectual firepower of The Heritage Foundation.”
Raymond Maxwell, a former State Department official, tells Attkisson of an
attempt by aides to former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton to
cull or “separate” documents that shed the department’s leadership in a bad
light before they were handed over to the investigators looking into
Benghazi.

The story has gotten some pickup on Fox News and conservative outlets,
along with some skepticism elsewhere. While chatting with Malzberg,
Attkisson said that detractors had cited Maxwell’s dabbling in poetry as a
reason to question his credibility. Then she went off:

“I think the newish trend that I experienced when I was at CBS — it’s fine
to have other people say he’s not credible because of his poetry. So you
cover the story and you let Ray have his say and then you let his opponents
say he’s not credible — but what the media does now is they black out a
story. They censor a story. They don’t even want it covered. That’s where I
think it seems so sinister to me in America that the media chooses to
basically blackball a story that they don’t want out there. And I think
they do it, quite frankly, lest the public come to the wrong opinion. They
don’t trust the public to come to what they think is the right opinion
about something and I don’t think we should be in the business of filtering
facts and information because we don’t like what the public may do with it.”

Conspiracy, meet theory. Too bad Attkisson’s very own experience
contradicts it: While at CBS News, as we’ve detailed in a previous post,
Attkisson wrote massively about Benghazi
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-benghazi-compound-lease-renewed-without-security/>
, Benghazi
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/state-department-responds-to-cbs-news-benghazi-info-request/>
, Benghazi
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/state-dept-releases-new-benghazi-aftermath-photos/>
,Benghazi
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-director-ok-for-congress-to-interview-benghazi-survivors/>
, Benghazi
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/rep-darrell-issa-received-general-threat-prior-to-libya-visit/>
, Benghazi
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/benghazi-investigators-defend-their-probe/>,
Benghazi
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/benghazi-accountability-review-board-comes-under-renewed-criticism/>
, Benghazi
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/state-department-defends-benghazi-decisions/>,
Benghazi
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/one-year-later-benghazis-lingering-issues/>,
Benghazi
<http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/benghazi-probe-didnt-go-far-enough-republicans-claim/>
,Benghazi
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/first-state-department-benghazi-photos-released/>
, Benghazi
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/officials-instructed-benghazi-hospital-to-list-stevens-as-john-doe/>
, Benghazi
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/emails-reveal-a-flurry-of-changes-to-benghazi-talking-points/>
, Benghazi
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/benghazi-disciplined-diplomat-a-prolific-poet/>
, Benghazi
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/officials-on-benghazi-we-made-mistakes-but-without-malice/>
, Benghazi
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/diplomat-us-special-forces-told-you-cant-go-to-benghazi-during-attacks/>
, Benghazi
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/three-more-officials-to-testify-about-benghazi-attacks/>
,Benghazi
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/benghazi-whistleblowers-still-waiting-to-tell-their-story/>
, Benghazi
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/house-investigators-talking-to-new-benghazi-whistleblowers/>
, Benghazi
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/six-months-later-where-are-the-benghazi-survivors/>
, Benghazi
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/source-press-officers-partly-responsible-for-benghazi-talking-points-changes/>
, Benghazi
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/gop-trio-wants-answers-on-obamas-actions-during-benghazi/>.
And that’s not even the full list.

What a blackout!

*Politico blog: Dylan Byers on Media: “AP's Peoples to cover Republican
2016 field”
<http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2014/09/aps-peoples-to-cover-republican-field-195711.html>*

By Dylan Byers

September 18, 2014, 10:17 a.m. EDT

The Associated Press has tapped Steve Peoples, its northeast political
reporter, to cover the field of Republican presidential hopefuls in 2016,
political editor David Scott announced in a memo to staff on Tuesday. He
will move from Boston to Washington.

"For months during the last presidential campaign, Peoples was a fixture in
the living rooms and coffee shops where the New Hampshire primary is won
and lost," Scott wrote. "In recent months, even as he continued covering
GOP contenders, Steve took it upon himself to keep the AP's political
reporting team organized and on point, leading story discussion meetings
and organizing coverage of key moments of the off-campaign year. His
assistance has been invaluable to me as I get up to speed in Washington."

Peoples' counterpart on the Democratic side is Ken Thomas, who will be
tasked with covering Hillary Rodham Clinton and the rest of the Democatic
field. They'll be joined by Julie Pace and members of the White House team,
as well as regional reporters from key states like Iowa, Florida and
Colorado.