November 7 - Comey's Reputation is More Important Than His Duty; How the Press Blew Up the Phony Email Scandal; Educating the Uninformed Electorate and Low-Information Voters

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the predictable announcement from the FBI Director James Comey that there was nothing to implicate Hillary Clinton in the emails under investigation between her close aide and Huma Abedin’s estranged and disgraced husband Anthony Weiner. Kurt Eichenwald, a senior writer at Newsweek where he has an op-ed “FBI Director James Comey is Unfit For Public Service”, joins us to discuss the extraordinary arrogance of a public servant who thinks his reputation is more important than his duty. We  look into the blithe disregard Comey appears to have for the consequences of his need to protect his reputation of integrity and his image of one who rises above politics to the point where he would tip the scales in a close election in the home stretch, then, at the last minute say there was no there there after reviving the endlessly overblown Hillary Clinton email pseudo scandal.

Part 2

Then we assess how much the press enabled the political impact of the Comey letter by falling for Republican Congressman Jason Chaffetz’s framing of the letter as a re-opening of the Clinton email investigation that in just a few days reversed Clinton’s momentum toward the presidency cutting her probability of victory from 85% to 65%. Eric Boehlert, a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America joins us to discuss the ultimate absurdity of so-called “balance” in the mainstream media that has devoted four times as much airtime to covering Hillary Clinton’s emails as they have spent covering all campaign policy initiatives from all candidates for the entire year.  

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Arthur Lupia Collegiate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan and author of “Uninformed: Why People Seem to Know So Little about Politics and What We Can Do About It”. He joins us to discuss what steps can be taken to address the deep-rooted problem of an uninformed electorate and to educate low-information voters who, while well-meaning and even passionate about their beliefs, know very little about politics and government.