Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert Explains How The AP Manufactured False Hillary Clinton “Pay-For-Play” Speculation 

From the August 29 edition of SiriusXM Insight's The Dean Obeidallah Show:

ERIC BOEHLERT: So the [Associated Press] went in, they got access to Hillary Clinton’s scheduling from secretary of state, and they crossed matched it to see who she met with that were Clinton [Foundation] donors and they came up with the wildly misleading premise of the story and then this absolutely categorically false tweet.

[...]

The obvious implication, she’s running a pay-for-play shop and if you donated to the Clinton Foundation, that’s how you met with her, if you didn’t meet with her, well good luck. She turned this into some kind of cash turnstile. So if you then go to read the story, where did they get “more than a half?” Well “more than a half” was 85 out of like 174 meetings were with donors. And you read that and you think, “She was secretary of state for 1,400 days. How the hell did she only have 175 meetings with people?” And you think, “That doesn’t make any sense.” And then you read, oh, the Associated Press is taking the tiny subset of people. They’re leaving out every government worker she met with and every representative from a foreign government. So when you factually look at her schedule, she had something like 1,700 meetings, met with thousands and thousands of people. But the AP wanted to turn this into a story, so they threw out 90 percent of those meetings and said, “We’re only going to focus on the private citizens, and that’s where we’re going to get more than half.”

Previously:

The AP, And Why The Press Has Trouble Admitting Its Clinton Mistakes

A Timeline Of The AP’s Flawed Clinton Foundation Reporting

AP Executive Editor Refuses To Take Down Clinton Foundation Tweet She Admits Is “Sloppy”