Insult to Injury

Via Dreamstime.

15 months into Mueller, I'm utterly certain Mike Schmidt doesn't understand the breadth and depth of the conspiracy investigation, the threat it poses to his credibility as a journo writing only about obstruction over and over. https://t.co/41CEmv60jP

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) August 12, 2018

One of my pet peeves is people saying, "It's not the crime, it's the coverup," with the general Watergate reference, as if to suggest committing primary crimes isn't as reprehensible as hiding them, when that's not what they mean, I assume, to say: they mean, I assume, that the coverup is where the detective or the prosecutor is going to catch them, in the part of the crime that's necessarily partly in public—desperate work to conceal the crimes of the Nixon administration is what ended up laying the crimes open to discovery.

But it just occurred to me that for somebody in Michael Schmidt's position—

(he's the Times reporter who broke the story in 2015 that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton had improperly used a private server for her unclassified email when she was in the Obama administration and followed through with an astonishing relentlessness while policy went undiscussed in his paper's coverage of the campaign,

The New York Times coverage of the email controversy was notoriously extensive; according to a Columbia Journalism Review analysis, "in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton's emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election (and that does not include the three additional articles on October 18, and November 6 and 7, or the two articles on the emails taken from John Podesta)." (Wikipedia)

focusing a national frenzy over an imaginable coverup for which there was no imaginable underlying crime at all)

—maybe the coverup really is literally worse than the initial crime, in that crimes merely injure society, whereas coverups are aimed at insulting the august media, a case of contempt of press.