How Hillary Clinton's pneumonia flap shows everything wrong with the press in 2016

A tale of two scandals

Clinton speaks to the press on Sept. 8.
(Image credit: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)

If you dropped into our presidential campaign last weekend knowing nothing about it, you probably would have been puzzled at why everyone was making such a big deal out of the fact that one of our major party nominees got light-headed one day — the result, we later learned, of pneumonia and probably dehydration, conditions that are easy to treat. What exactly was so momentous about this event, that it should have the news media so worked up? The answer is just about everything that's wrong with the way the 2016 campaign has been covered.

Let's not mince words here: Donald Trump — a bigot and a con man who appeals to the worst instincts of the worst people, who neither knows nor cares how government works, who encourages violence and promises to commit war crimes, who lies so often and so blatantly that it's positively pathological, who has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that he's the most loathsome human being to have been nominated by a major party in living memory — Donald freaking Trump stands a reasonably good chance of being elected president of the United States and thus becoming the most powerful human being on Earth, and news outlets are running pieces on "Hydrated Hillary: 9 times Clinton quenched her thirst."

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Paul Waldman

Paul Waldman is a senior writer with The American Prospect magazine and a blogger for The Washington Post. His writing has appeared in dozens of newspapers, magazines, and web sites, and he is the author or co-author of four books on media and politics.