Clinton Story Crit

Clinton story Crit

By Christian Hisman

The Clinton story written by Schmidt and Apuzzo was a story that seemed like it was rushed together and was not checked properly for correct facts. In the article it talks about the investigation that was requested on Clinton’s private email account. When in fact the request was not for specifically Clinton’s account but for any compromised information with connection to Clinton’s account. Having to see corrections at the bottom of the page made the entire article less trustworthy. They needed to take their time in getting the story out correctly rather than try to get it out as fast as possible. The article was up for anybody to read for two days with no corrections and could have lead people to not fully understand the story.

                The tone of the story was good for what the article was supposed to be. I feel the article just tried to state the facts and not turn blame toward Clinton too much. The lead paragraph, other than having incorrect facts, did a good job in starting the article with the right tone and setting up the rest of the article. I think the article was good to keep out any graphics or photos that would have not fit within the article. I do not think the article needed any photos because of the nature of the story.

               The attributions in the article matched well with what quotes were used. All quotes and other parts to the story that needed attribution got it. They did a good job on letting readers know where or who the statements came from. The personal information in this story was mostly about the emails that were sent and under question. Most of the emails reported in the article were about the Benghazi attacks in 2012. The articles were all seen as non-classified information at the time Clinton dealt with them. It seemed there was a lot of information in the article trying to clear her name when it came to those emails.

               The article was written well as far as grammar and spelling goes. I did not see any mistakes in spelling or a misuse of grammar elements but that should be expected in an article from the New York Times. There were some AP style discrepancies because the Times does not use the same type to style that we are used to because of their audience. There was abundance of Mrs. And Mr. in this article which would not be used in AP after the first mention of their name.

               When it comes to the article being fair or not I think it was fair on both sides of the story. It gave the facts and let the information tell the story. I think without the errors that were listed at the bottom of the article it was a good story. The only real problem with ethics of the story was the fact that they tried to push the story out to quickly which led to inaccuracies with certain facts. Ethically they should have known that the article needed more time to be correctly reported.