The New York Times' Paul Krugman called out the media's fraudulent coverage of the Benghazi committee and Hillary Clinton's email use, for treating the non-scandals as “real debates about national security or economics even when it's both obvious and easy to show that nothing of the kind is actually taking place.” 

In an October 9 column, Krugman observed that House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy “inadvertently did the nation a big favor with his ill-advised honesty” when he bragged about the Benghazi committee's success in “inflicting political damage on Hillary Clinton,” exposing how the Fox News manufactured Benghazi hearings “had nothing to do with national security.”

Krugman called out media figures who cover topics such as the Benghazi hearings and Clinton's use of email for pretending “that we're having real debates about national security or economics even when it's both obvious and easy to show that nothing of the kind is actually taking place,” calling it a “kind of fraudulence”: 

So Representative Kevin McCarthy, who was supposed to succeed John Boehner as speaker of the House, won't be pursuing the job after all. He would have faced a rough ride both winning the post and handling it under the best of circumstances, thanks to the doomsday caucus -- the fairly large bloc of Republicans demanding that the party cut off funds to Planned Parenthood, or kill Obamacare, or anyway damage something liberals like, by shutting down the government and forcing it into default.

Still, he finished off his chances by admitting -- boasting, actually -- that the endless House hearings on Benghazi had nothing to do with national security, that they were all about inflicting political damage on Hillary Clinton.

But we all knew that, didn't we?

I often wonder about commentators who write about things like those hearings as if there were some real issue involved, who keep going on about the Clinton email controversy as if all these months of scrutiny had produced any evidence of wrongdoing, as opposed to sloppiness.

Surely they have to know better, whether they admit it to themselves or not. And surely the long history of Clinton nonscandals and retracted allegations -- remember, there never was anything to the Whitewater accusations -- should serve as a cautionary tale.

Somehow, though, politicians who pretend to be concerned about issues, but are obviously just milking those issues for political gain, keep getting a free pass. And it's not just a Clinton story.

[...]

Again, none of this should come as news to anyone who follows politics and policy even moderately closely. But I'm not sure that normal people, who have jobs to do and families to raise, are getting the message. After all, who will tell them?

Sometimes I have the impression that many people in the media consider it uncouth to acknowledge, even to themselves, the fraudulence of much political posturing. The done thing, it seems, is to pretend that we're having real debates about national security or economics even when it's both obvious and easy to show that nothing of the kind is actually taking place. 

But turning our eyes away from political fakery, pretending that we're having a serious discussion when we aren't, is itself a kind of fraudulence. Mr. McCarthy inadvertently did the nation a big favor with his ill-advised honesty, but telling the public what's really going on shouldn't depend on politicians with loose lips.