EVEN WITH ALL THE FAVORABLE PRESS TREATMENT...:

The State Department's report reaches two broad conclusions. Clinton's "use of a private email system to conduct official business added an increased degree of risk" that classified information would be compromised. But "there was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information."

In 2016, the State Department's inspector general also determined that Clinton's Republican predecessors, Secretaries Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, also received classified information on their personal email accounts.

So Clinton committed the same mistake committed by her predecessors -- Powell reportedly advised Clinton to use a personal email account for non-classified communications shortly after Clinton became secretary -- and the State Department's report found no systemic mishandling of information. [...]

As CJR later summarized this research, the Berkman Klein Center "found roughly four times as many Clinton-related sentences that described scandals as opposed to policies, whereas Trump-related sentences were one-and-a-half times as likely to be about policy as scandal." Indeed, emails so dominated coverage that "the various Clinton-related email scandals--her use of a private email server while secretary of state, as well as the DNC and John Podesta hacks--accounted for more sentences than all of Trump's scandals combined (65,000 vs. 40,000) and more than twice as many as were devoted to all of her policy positions."

Meanwhile, CJR researchers Duncan J. Watts and David M. Rothschild did a deep dive into how the New York Times covered 2016, and their findings are just as stark. "Of the 1,433 articles that mentioned Trump or Clinton," during the last 69 days of the 2016 campaign, "291 were devoted to scandals or other personal matters while only 70 mentioned policy, and of these only 60 mentioned any details of either candidate's positions."

One-hundred fifty of these New York Times articles, moreover, appeared on the paper's front page. Of these, only 16 discussed policy in any way, "of which six had no details, four provided details on Trump's policy only, one on Clinton's policy only, and five made some comparison between the two candidates' policies." By contrast, the Times ran 10 front-page articles on Clinton's emails in just six days, between October 29 and November 3.

The overarching impression created by this reporting, in other words, was that the emails were more important than all of the policy questions facing voters in 2016 -- questions like whether millions of Americans would lose health care, whether the United States would bar immigrants because of their religion, and who would control the Supreme Court.

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