Clinton and the press
by digby
NPR did some analysis of the big “Clinton is dodging the press” complaint and it’s quite interesting. It turns out she is doing plenty of press with local and regional papers and she prefers to do TV interviews, town halls etc. But it’s true that she hasn’t held a press conference at all this year, which is bugging the hell out of the press corps because they love the sort of pile-on those events inevitably turn out to be with politicians who aren’t deft at the easygoing glad-handing of the media as George W Bush,Bill Clinton or Barack Obama were. Still, it’s part of the job whether she likes it or not.
Anyway, it’s quite interesting. It doesn’t let Clinton of the hook at all but I think this observation shows she may understand something about the political press pack that they don’t understand about themselves:
During one of her longer conversations, with Politico’s Glenn Thrush for his podcast in early April, Clinton revealed some of her thinking about the reporters who cover her.
“Once you get to a national press position, like yours and the others that are traveling with me, you’re really under, in my impression, a kind of pressure to produce a political story,” Clinton told Thrush.
“A headline,” Thrush offered.
“That’s your job,” Clinton said. “A headline, right? I totally get it.”
There has always been tremendous pressure to nail Clinton going back 25 years and it has always been even more aggressive toward her than it was to her husband. And perversely because she’s running against this lunatic Donald Trump, who produces shocking headlines every day, they are under even more pressure to find something, anything to prove that they aren’t Clinton apologists because they’re covering the running catastrophe of Trump’s campaign so thoroughly.
This is an old dynamic and I get it. I feel it too. Nobody likes to fight off accusations of being a hack. But that’s a problem in itself.
Anyway, it’s a good article. This one by Brian Beutler on the same subject is good too. I don’t know what the answer to the problem is but it’s a real problem.
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