JON SCOTT (HOST): Here's a sample that was published on the New York Times website in the opening minutes after that report was released, Lynn. The headline -- which is not written by the reporter -- but the headline reads, pardon me, “House Benghazi Report Finds No New Evidence Of Wrongdoing By Hillary Clinton.” And then one of the closing sentences, “Mr. Gowdy” --who headed that committee -- “praised the heroes as Americans who died in the attacks on September 11, 2012. They included ambassador Christopher Stevens and Sean Smith, killed in Benghazi by a mob of militia fighters who had been incited by an American-made video deriding the prophet Muhammad.” Now Gowdy, Lynn, clearly stated that there was no evidence that that video had anything to do with what happened in Benghazi, and yet the Times is still referring to it there.
LYNN SWEET: Well let me try and bring this down to a few bite-size chunks because the report -- which I have not read is 800 pages -- but since this is a journalistic segment here, when you have that much information, a reporter, a columnist, an editorial writer, a news producer, what you see is a lot of decisions being made on just what is the news here? If you are a political writer or have that orientation, you want to know in the midst of a presidential campaign, is there damaging information that we didn't know about Hillary Clinton? If that was your angle, and I want to put out there, there are many angles that you could have pursued if you're writing the news story off this report. Well, there seem to be from -- I’m just reading what others wrote -- that there was no new evidence that surfaced. If you want to read a story about did the Obama administration mess up, well there seems to be many things that the report said that could lead you to write that lead. So as in a lot of news stories, what you read is a determination in the first [inaudible], kind of a subjective, maybe not necessarily partisan decision on what is the main story here, and I want to put out there that there were many stories, and what you might say is media partisanship, I think is just viewed from the lens of what the task at hand was for the writer or producer.
