Reddit user noSine summed it up perfectly in a top post on the subreddit SandersForPresident today:

“I’ve been seeing the word ‘suggest’ in headlines on US media including NYT, ABC News, Newsmax etc. This leaves the emails open to interpretation – they aren’t. “They quite clearly showed a large degree of contempt and bias on the part of the D.N.C., and this still hasn’t been fully acknowledged by a lot of mainstream media.”

This is absolutely true. It would take up all this article’s space to list all the media outlets sporting headlines about the emails containing the ambiguous words “suggests” and “appears to,” but here are a few of them:

From the New York Times, “Released Emails Suggest the D.N.C. Derided the Sanders Campaign.”

Excuse me? “Suggest” the DNC derided Sanders’ campaign? It is quite clear from the NYT‘s own article that this is precisely what happened, from DNC communications official Mark Paustenbach calling Sanders’ campaign “a mess,” to the notorious Debbie Wasserman-Schultz saying Sanders “isn’t going to be president” (something that was unknowable at that time), it is indisputably obvious that the said derision was in fact happening, but the Times opted to paint a nebulous “maybe they did, maybe they didn’t” picture with its headline.

Wikileaks dump appears to show DNC favored Clinton campaign https://t.co/NPm340QF8y pic.twitter.com/we0R2xV2t4 — Fox News (@FoxNews) July 23, 2016

From the Huffington Post, Leaked Emails Suggest DNC Was Conspiring Against Bernie Sanders.

No, the emails do not “suggest” such a conspiracy was happening, they blatantly and unequivocally show DNC officials doing what can only be called conspiring, and the content of the author’s own article shows clearly that there was no reason for her to use such a deceptively equivocal title. The article quotes Paustenbach suggesting an anti-Bernie narrative they could spin in which the senator “never had his act together,” as well as quoting chief financial officer Brad Marshall suggesting ways in which Sanders’ religious beliefs could be manipulated to cast him in a negative light to the public. It also contains a link to a Heavy article with links to many more examples of DNC officials scheming and slandering against Sanders via email, consistently referring to themselves and the Hillary campaign as “we” while referring to Sanders in the second person.

Yahoo finally got around to picking up this major story. https://t.co/G1kUaUndkA — Tom (@Tomvegas1) July 23, 2016

This is important not just in the interest of unbiased journalistic integrity, but more importantly because these same leaked emails also reveal why media outlets would be so keen on biasing their content in order to stay on the DNC’s good side.

Some particularly chilling emails in the WikiLeaks archive reveal an ominous conversation between Wasserman-Schultz and NBC News political director Chuck Todd, in which the DNC chair authoritatively told him that the negative coverage of her by Morning Joe‘s Mika Brzezinski “must stop,” that Brzezinski’s unfavorable statements about the DNC chair are “the LAST straw,” and that she “needs to apologize.” In other words, the head of the DNC called upon the boss of one of the only pundits on mainstream media to ever dare to openly criticize the DNC’s bias and instructed him to make her stop.

That’s right. Just a casual conversation between the media and a powerful political organization about censoring the news. If you’re still wondering if this should freak you out, the answer is yes.

More from Morning Joe discussing how DNC has rigged the election.



Published on May 18, 2016

The liberal half of... https://t.co/9vctR1EFVH — Marty Wilde (@martywilde) May 21, 2016

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the emails also show a correspondence between Politico reporter Kenneth Vogel in which the writer sent an article to DNC officials in late April for their approval, before his own editors even read it. Just to be clear, it is not standard practice for journalists to get the authorization of the politicians they’re writing about before publishing. The subject line of the emails reads “per agreement… any thoughts appreciated.” What was that agreement and how many more like it exist? Who knows.

If it wasn’t already obvious to everyone that American politicians have the news media wrapped around their fingers, it should be now. The fact that the evidence of this is still being obfuscated by that same news media by deliberate understatement and ambiguity is just more icing on the cake.

[Photo by Richard Drew/AP Images]