The Associated Press has noticed that some people have taken issue with their Tuesday article which maintained "many donors" of the Clinton Foundation met with her at the State Department, and implied the 84 donors who met with Clinton over the course her four years as Secretary of State were in a privileged position.
It’s not that there wasn’t good information in the AP report, which ultimately shows no wrongdoing. It’s that the lede of the story went beyond click-bait, and into the realm of “controversy bait.” The way the story was structured wasn’t just deceptive, the data was filtered, the presentation distorted, and facts that didn’t fit the narrative were selectively omitted in order to create “scandal” out of, if not nothing, then very thin air.
Now the AP has issued a statement defending their article, but that statement has its own problems.
It focused on Mrs. Clinton’s meetings and calls involving people outside government who were not federal employees or foreign diplomats, because meeting with U.S. or foreign government officials would inherently have been part of her job as secretary of state.
The biggest issue with the original story is embedded right there in this paragraph. Meeting with private citizens? That’s not an extracurricular activity. It’s also inherently part of the job of the Secretary of State.