[inaudible conversations] thank you, everybody. Thank you for coming. First a round of applause so excited to be hosting susan bordo and Katha Pollitt, and were also so luck to have Katha Pollitt here in conversation. [applause] so, welcome to become culture on columbus. And just a quick notice also, see a couple of cameras here. Were recording for booktv on cspan 2 so after the formal conversation well take questions but wait for me to find you with me microphone so they can hear you as well. A quick show of handed if it is your first time to book culture of columbus . Welcome. 20 years ago, this space was the endicott book septemberers but is closed along with men a wonderful become stores about we just celebrated two years here at 450 columbus. [applause] and were looking forward to staying here for many more. One small thing you to help is pick up a copy of two or three or four of the become tonight so we can continue to be here and host great speakers and talk about important topics. I know i was so excited that book culture and column because was able to host this talk and youre in for a wonderful treat. Again, special thanks to melva for being a great partner and bringing us great authors bringing great authors to print. So then the last susan bore deis a media christianic, cultural historian and feminist scholar. She was a book nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the creation of ann bolin and buy destruction of Hillary Clinton out now. Joining her in conversation is Katha Pollitt, has won many prizes, including the National Book critic circle award for her collection of poetry and last point of procedure, after the talk, if you could give us just a couple of minutes to set up. Well have the authors on the other side of the register where we have copies book. After the talk, everybody wants to congratulate so give us a couple minutes to get sit up. Without any further adieu, turn it over to susan and katha. Thank you. [applause] thank you for having us. I thought id start by saying a couple of words about what the book and is what it isnt and then do a very brief reading, which actually was inspired by something that i heard as we drove to washington yesterday. The book first of all is not an insider look at the campaign, which as most of you know, there has been recent lay book published that is such an insider look. I dont know the clintons. I dont in the people that worked in their campaign. Have no insider knowledge. What i come to this book as is a voter, a viewer, purveyor of popular culture, who a had has the great privilege by virtue of the fact i have a job that allows me to im a teacher and writer to pay a certain kind of attention to what was going on. That most people cant. Most people who have ninetofive jobs, get up in morning and dependent on the Headline News in the morning to tell them what is going on go to work, come back, hear the 5 00 news. So what theyre getting is whatever the media has decided to headline and present as the Important News of the day. Very often that is fragmented, its misleading, its not necessarily because the media are im not a trump. Dont think the media are an opposition party. Evil people. And at their best we rely on them enormously to do really good journalistic work for us. But its a very hard job keeping up, especially on these rolling news channels which go on for 24 hours. Sorting things out, fact checking. All comes at them very fast and theyve rely more and more on narrative rather than on the investigation of events and people. So often the last one to a narrative and that becomes the guiding thread of what they announce. And this happened over and over again with Hillary Clinton. The book is also not an examination of her policies. I dont really look at that. It is not too different from the become that i wrote before this, which was called the creation of ann bolin and seems like thats a stretch in centuries, but the books are very similar in that they both really are studies of representation and misrepresentation, and the way in which women with their faults and their virtues, have gotten translated, reproduced, mug mythologized in certain ways that become caricatures. My contention is that a lot of people who voted against hillary were voting actually for such a character, a caricature. The big difference, of course, is that were talking not about 500 years but were talking about three decades, and in particular, the last election cycle. In which this happened in a very, very come pressed way. Compressed way. What im going to read from the become also does not have as some recent books about hill havedoesnt but the blame on any one factor for the loss. It tries to do a multidimensional analysis that looks at number of thing that contributed to what happened. Do see certain things as effective but currently are not really being given enough credence bit the media. I see comeys announcement 11 dibefore the election as very, very important, especially in the context of the incredible attention the emails were given over the course of the election. Hillary would try to describe her policies and all your heard was, email, email, email from the press. So that when the were revived the last moment as a point at which trump was actually in quite deep trouble, because the access hollywood tapes just came out and Michelle Obama had given her stirring speech about how it had shaken her to the core and women had come forward with stories of his sexual abuse. His numbers were plummeting, and then what do you know . Comeys announcement, which really we know did turn things around. There are charts and graphed that show that. I mention that because as we were it has a lot to do with what im going to read here. As we where are driving here we were listening to shattered. I have not read the whole book and wont provide a review or commentary but what struck me in the part we heard was the fact that the authors accepted the narrative that hillary lied about her emails. They simply presented it as, yes, she lied about her email, and her fatal mistake at least in the part i was reading is that the didnt apologize enough. Nowow, i thought i was actually shocked because even though i know that a number of myths have persisted, i thought that one probably had been disspelled at this point, but actually it hasnt. Actually the numbers of people who believe that she lied, and indeed the number of people that believe she should be in jail because of this, is still rather astoundingly large. So what i want to read from then we can take the conversation any direction you want. What i want to read from is a section about the emails because, frankly, when i first brought the become out i thought it would be the big scoop of the book because in this chapter i believe that i definitively approve that hillary did not lie but that she didnt even behave carelessly. I dont know why it hasnt been pick up as a big scoop. Maybe because it puts the blame on the mainstream media. Im not sure. But im just going to read you a little bit from it. Heres a shocker. Clinton did not lie about the damned emails. Nor did she treat classified material in an extremely careless manner. The email scandal, like many previous investigations into the clintons, was a whole lot of nothing blown to Nuclear Proportions by the g. O. P. And helpfully served up in an endless stream of tasty poisonous portions by the mainstream media. For week we snacked on high calorie accusations and i insinuations including some delivered permanently by vladimir putin, via wiki licks and then just as wikileakss and then as we appeared to be stuffed to brim and the attention turned though trumpish behavior that has shaken Michelle Obama and other women to her core we are were presented with a flaming dessert courtesy of james comey. The next couple of sections which i wont treat you describe how the email scandal got constructed by the press. Part one is called the scandal. Its born. Part two is called, clinton becomes a criminal, courtesy of the new york times. Part three is called, clinton is vindicated but no one knows it some may have on she Rachel Maddow show after the state department produced their report on how the email systems were handled and she came out with this huge stack of paper which represented how theyre supposed to keep and classify their emails, just a completely archaic, disshelved, cumbersome system. Which led some people to conclude that theres really what is going on here is just a mess of a system. Nothing to do with Hillary Clinton at all. And then part four is comeys abuse of power, act one. Ill summarize a tiny bit and then read a page or two. Think you all remember the james comey the first james comey announcement. Dont have to real the whole in which the delivered what many people thought was a mixed verdict. He cleared her of all criminal charges, but he went on to accuse her of being extremely careless with her emails, and in fact he spent so much time talk about how careless she was was number of people came away, having seen that television presentation, thinking that it was a mixed verdict are right . She was sort of guilty. What republicans were not happy and democrats were unhappy. The republicans hauled james comey into a hearing and its at that hearing that i was lucky enough for watch it from morning to night, and i it was at that hearing that comey actually admitted that not only had clinton nod lied but that she had not behaved carelessly at all but in an entirely reasonable manner, and yet this didnt make the headlines and i want to read a bit of this to you. Because its a kind of illustration, a very decisive one, that in miniillustration of what went on all the time. On july , 2016, House Republican unhappy with comeys failure to indict clinton had asked him to answer questions from them to which he agreed. Grilling him they got little more than a slight elaboration of the initial extremely careless assessment but when democrats took over the questions thinks got rockier for comby. First, a Alevi Cummings pressed comey to that only three of the 110 emails in question had any kind of markings on them at all which would have aced the recipient to their classified status. Those three, moreover, as cummings got comey to admit, were mismarked, as it later turn out, only entirely with a little tiny c in the body of the email. Then congressman Matt Cartwright who i think of as the money shot, right, this particular change formed comey to admit the emails with the internal cs were not properly marked according to the state department manual, and that his previous comments that comey had made, that any reasonable person would have known the emails were classified was imimapplause able if not an out and out falsehood. To judge an unheaded email a classified was a starred that was unreasonable to apply. It would be a reasonable inference that the the documents missing the header were not classified. Holding the manual in his hand cartwright got to the point and here i just read from the transcript cartwright you were asked about markings on a few documents. I have the manual here, Marking National classified security information. And i dont think you were given a full chance to talk about this three document with the little cs on them. Were the proper live documented . Were they proper my marked according to the manual . James comey no. Cartwright according to the manual dish ask nance unanimous consent to enter this into the record. Chairman so ordinary. According to the manual if youre going to classify something there has to be a header on the document. Right . Comey correct. Cartwright was there head ago this three documents with the little c in the text someplace . Comey no. There were three emails, the c was in the body in text but no header on the email or in the text. Cartwright so, if president excuse me if secretary clinton really were an expert about what is classified and what is not classified and were following the manual, the absence of a header would tell her immediate he the three documents were not classified. Am i correct in that . Comey speaking in a very lawyerly way that would be a reasonable inference. Comeys admission exen rated hillary not only from any carelessness or negligence but also from the charge of lying about not sending of receiving classified emails. It be ryan for her to conclude that the emails were not classified, which is what he had been saying for months elm res mad been badgering her and badgering her and badgering her and every time she said this they accused her of hiding something. Surely at this point, comey ought to have held a fullblown press conference, apologizings for his inaccurate assessment of clintons handling of classified material. Instead he was silent while the media incessantly hammered away about lies. It was a recklessly dissive named narrative with no basis in fact, yet did his mischaracterizize was disclosed he offered know reextraction of his previous commentary which was let than political dirty work. Thats i mean nbc, cnn and fox. He is exen rating the exchanges never their importance was never turned into break news or a headline story. Na start, the media dug its heels in, even further, on belying clinton issues. Im going to skip a bunch because i want to get to interchange here but i want to finish the end of the chapter. Having gone through a couple of example houston the media doug its heels in, and what impression that left with viewer, i think say consider, too that every comeys exen racing, polling showed that 56 of americans believed clinton had indeed broken the law by relying on a personal email address, with another 36 piling on to say the episode showed bad judgment, albeit not criminality. Those numbers are gastly, considering as demonstrated in the chap she has in fact broken no law order behaved carelessly but theyre unsurprising given the overwhelming negative attention that network and cable news had paid to clintons emails, more air time, as matthew would report, than to all policy issues combined. During the entire general election campaign, from june 7th to november 8th, clinton only led over trump in quantity of Media Coverage four times. Once when she had pneumonia, once during the dnc, and the other two were during and right after james comeys announcement. Thus, a story that was at best of modest significance came to dominate the u. S. President ial election. And of course came back to become what i think was a fatal blow. Creating a misleading impression of clintons character and competence and vastly overshadowing her policy comp peps and policy. It gave a false impression of what a club continue president si would bike. With san at the and the g. O. P. Obsession with temperature emails, both of which were lavishly covered by the meet ya the Clinton Campaign as defined be negative sound bites. Wasnt the case he had no message which we now hear over and over, she was never given a space to deliver it as the email scandal swamped the media. [applause] well to get the full story, its all in the book and its extremely fascinating. I want to move on from the email. What dibernie say . Enough about the damned emails. And i your book is quite an indictment of the media chug what we think as the centrist, objective or liberal media, msnbc, the new york times, cnn, Washington Post and you say they basically created a portrait of hillary as ununtrustyworth request, differ honest, hautey and unlikeable and then they reported on people saying she was untrustworthy and you show that impression went from being an impression to being a piece of news once in the to polls and then you can ask about it. And i just remember at one point during various opinions during the campaign, ask hillly why do people dislike you so much . When did you start beating your wife. It is like that. Id like to know what you think as a media critic and a brilliant philosopher, why do you think the media took this approach . Its a great question. I think it requires sort of multifaceted answer. Okay. Part one is the long history of the way the media, inspired by the g. O. P. I think that the sequence of transmission here is now were going back to bill clinton and bill clintons presidency and the sense of the g. O. P. Had that the world which was rightfully there is was being taken over by a bunch of liberal hippies, and one of whom was a radical feminist, right . And there began at that time what hillary later described as a vast right wing conspiracy, we thought it was paranoid at the time. Turned out to be pretty damn true. The g. O. P. Got into the habit of ferreting out whatever they could that could be turned into a suspicious bit of behavior, potential scandal on the part of bill clinton at that point, mostly, and treating it like red meat to the press, the rightwing press and also the liberal press. So theres a tradition, media tradition and jonathan allen, wrote a wonderful piece called the five rules for covering the clintons or Something Like that. Basically the rules are, suspect everything, never let them explain. I cant remember what all five were but very good piece. We begin there. And with the couple potholes that hillary herself fell into, the remark that some of you might remember in which clinton was being questioned about here career choices and she said i suppose could i have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas instead i began i chose to follow my career. Media took that piece, right, put it out there and neglected to also include what she said after that, which is, for my entire career so far and in the future i will always work for women being able to have the choice of one or the other or both. Media didnt report that. She got into terrible trouble. For saying that. Housewives across the country were she is cite sizing us, she hateses us, the disdains our choices. She didnt disdain their choices when you describe being stay at home mother as baking cookies and having teas, you have kind of expressed it in a way that doesnt show that you think this is a valuable way to spend your life. I think the thing that people didnt get was she was actually talking about bag governors wife and having those official functions itch dont know that governors wives bake cookies but she did dig that hole for herself but she should have said, i want to be a lawyer. She wanted to be both. She was both. She was mom. And she was a lawyer. Right. She always had trouble in arkansas which was not, i think, ready for a whom who kept her own name. She had to take it bills name to hip him get reelected and her hair