He began with a broad question about the most important characteristic that a Commander in Chief can possess. I used my answer to talk about steadiness, a quality that nobody ever associates with Donald Trump. Lauer cut in to say, “You’re talking about judgment.” That wasn’t what I was talking about, exactly, but it was close enough. “Temperament and judgment, yes,” I replied.
I’ve been around the block enough times to know that something bad was coming. Lauer had the look of someone proud of himself for having laid a clever trap.
“The word judgment has been used a lot around you, Secretary Clinton, over the last year and a half, and in particular concerning your use of your personal email and server to communicate while you were Secretary of State,” Lauer said. “You’ve said it’s a mistake. You said you made not the best choice. You were communicating on highly sensitive topics. Why wasn’t it more than a mistake? Why wasn’t it disqualifying, if you want to be Commander in Chief?”
It was disappointing but predictable that he had so quickly steered the supposedly high-minded “Commander in Chief Forum” to the subject of emails, months after the director of the FBI had announced there was no case and closed the investigation. I understood that every political reporter wanted his or her pound of flesh. But Lauer had already grilled me about emails in an interview back in April. I figured this must be about “balance.” Many in the mainstream media bend over backward to avoid criticism from the right about being soft on Democrats. If Lauer intended to ask Trump tough questions, he had to make a show of grilling me, too.
Of course, that isn’t balanced at all—because balanced doesn’t mean strictly equal. It means reasonable. It means asking smart questions backed by solid reporting and making decisions about coverage that will help people get the information they need to make sound decisions. Picking the midpoint between two sides, no matter how extreme one of them is, isn’t balanced—it’s false equivalence. If Trump ripped the shirt off someone at a rally and a button fell off my jacket on the same day, the headline “Trump and Clinton Experience Wardrobe Malfunctions, Campaigns in Turmoil” might feel equal to some, but it wouldn’t be balanced, and it definitely wouldn’t be fair. Most important, the voters wouldn’t learn anything that would help them decide who should be president.
The Lauer episode was a perfect example. I made a mistake with my emails. I apologized, I explained, I explained, and apologized some more. Yet here we were, after all these months, and after the FBI finished its work, at a forum supposed to be about the security of our country, and to balance the fact that Trump was going to have a hard time answering even the most straightforward questions, we were spending our time on emails.
After the election, a report from Professor Thomas Patterson at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy explained how damaging the pursuit of false equivalency can be. “If everything and everyone are portrayed negatively, there’s a leveling effect that opens the door to charlatans,” it said. “The press historically has helped citizens recognize the difference between the earnest politician and the pretender. Today’s news coverage blurs the distinction.”
Here I was, facing the blurring in real time, with a charlatan waiting in the wings. But what could I do? I launched into my standard answer on the emails, the one I’d given a thousand times before: “It was a mistake to have a personal account. I would certainly not do it again. I make no excuses for it,” and so forth. I also explained that, as the FBI had confirmed, none of the emails I sent or received was marked as classified.
Instead of moving on to any of a hundred urgent national security issues, from the civil war in Syria, to the Iranian nuclear agreement, to the threat from North Korea—the issues this forum was supposed to be about—Lauer stayed on emails. He asked four follow-ups. Meanwhile, the clock was ticking, and my thirty minutes to discuss serious foreign policy challenges were slipping away.
Finally, after learning absolutely nothing new or interesting, Lauer turned to a question from one of the veterans NBC had picked to be in the audience. He was a self-described Republican, a former Navy lieutenant who had served in the first Gulf War, and he promptly repeated the right-wing talking point about how my email use would have landed anyone else in prison. Then he asked how could he trust me as President “when you clearly corrupted our national security?”
Now I was ticked off. NBC knew exactly what it was doing here. The network was treating this like an episode of The Apprentice, in which Trump stars and ratings soar. Lauer had turned what should have been a serious discussion into a pointless ambush. What a waste of time.
When another veteran in the audience was finally allowed to ask about how to defeat ISIS, Lauer interrupted me before I began answering. “As briefly as you can,” he admonished. Trump should have reported his performance as an in-kind contribution.
Later, there were rumors ginned up by fake news reports that I was so mad at him I stormed off stage, threw a tantrum, and shattered a water glass. While I didn’t do any of that, I can’t say I didn’t fantasize about shaking some sense into Lauer while I was out there.
Now I wish I had pushed back hard on his question. I should have said, “You know, Matt, I was the one in the Situation Room advising the President to go after Osama bin Laden. I was with Leon Panetta and David Petraeus urging stronger action sooner in Syria. I worked to rebuild Lower Manhattan after 9/11 and provide health care to our first responders. I’m the one worried about Putin subverting our democracy. I started the negotiations with Iran to prevent a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. I’m the one national security experts trust with our country’s future.” And so much more. Here’s another example where I remained polite, albeit exasperated, and played the political game as it used to be, not as it had become. That was a mistake.
Later, I watched Lauer soft-pedal Trump’s interview. “What do you believe prepares you to make decisions that a Commander in Chief has to make?” he asked. Then he failed to call Trump out on his lies about Iraq. I was almost physically sick.
Thankfully, a lot of viewers reacted exactly the same way. The Washington Post published a stinging editoriaclass="underline"
Judging by the amount of time NBC’s Matt Lauer spent pressing Hillary Clinton on her emails during Wednesday’s national security presidential forum, one would think that her homebrew server was one of the most important issues facing the country this election. It is not. There are a thousand other substantive issues—from China’s aggressive moves in the South China Sea to National Security Agency intelligence-gathering to military spending—that would have revealed more about what the candidates know and how they would govern. Instead, these did not even get mentioned in the first of five and a half precious prime-time hours the two candidates will share before Election Day, while emails took up a third of Ms. Clinton’s time.
Criticism of Lauer and NBC poured in. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof called the forum “an embarrassment to journalism.” Slate’s Will Saletan described it as “one of the weakest, least incisive performances I’ve seen from a presidential forum moderator.” And The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah had my favorite take: “During World War II, on multiple occasions, kamikaze planes crashed into the Intrepid, and last night Matt Lauer continued that tradition,” he said. “I don’t know what the f— he was doing, and neither did he.”
Sadly, though, millions of people watched. And in my view, the “Commander in Chief Forum” was representative of how many in the press covered the campaign as a whole. According again to Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, discussion of public policy accounted for just 10 percent of all campaign news coverage in the general election. Nearly all the rest was taken up by obsessive coverage of controversies such as email. Health care, taxes, trade, immigration, national security—all of it crammed into just 10 percent of the press coverage. The Shorenstein Center found that not a single one of my many detailed policy plans received more than a blip of press coverage. “If she had a policy agenda, it was not apparent in the news,” it concluded. “Her lengthy record of public service also received scant attention.” None of Trump’s scandals, from scamming students at Trump University, to stiffing small businesses in Atlantic City, to exploiting his foundation, to refusing to release his taxes as every presidential candidate since 1976 has done—and on and on—generated the kind of sustained, campaign-defining coverage that my emails did.