This Is How Hillary Clinton Gets the Coverage She Wants – Gawker
Hillary Clinton’s supporters often argue that mainstream political reporters are incapable of covering her positively—or even fairly. While it may be true that the political press doesn’t always write exactly what Clinton would like, emails recently obtained by Gawker offer a case study in how her prodigious and sophisticated press operation manipulates reporters into amplifying her desired message—in this case, down to the very word that The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder used to describe an important policy speech.
The emails in question, which were exchanged by Ambinder, a former Atlantic contributing editor, and Philippe Reines, Clinton’s notoriously combative spokesman and consigliere, turned up thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request we filed in 2012 (and which we are currently suing the State Department over). The same request previously revealed that Politico’s chief White House correspondent, Mike Allen, promised to deliver positive coverage of Chelsea Clinton, and, in a separate exchange, permitted Reines to ghost-write an item about the State Department for Politico’s Playbook newsletter. Ambinder’s emails with Reines demonstrate the same kind of transactional reporting, albeit to a much more legible degree: In them, you can see Reines “blackmailing” Ambinder into describing a Clinton speech as “muscular” in exchange for early access to the transcript. In other words, Ambinder outsourced his editorial judgment about the speech to a member of Clinton’s own staff.
From: This Is How Hillary Clinton Gets the Coverage She Wants
Why I will not be voting for Hillary Clinton:
1. She is entitled – Clinton believes she deserves to be anointed President by the press and her party.
2. She tries to solve problems by complaining about them – this is not what a leader does.
3. She easily allows herself to be a victim – i.e. emails. Again, this is not what a leader does.
There is one who is the antithesis to all these qualities, who is a natural born leader, and that is Donald Trump. Trump knows he is an outsider and has to work hard to be President, he solves his problems by bullying his way out of them, which is more or less what a leader does, and he does not allow himself to be cast as a victim despite a superabundance of high-profile political blunders.
It’s too bad about the insanity. I think if we could somehow combine Trump’s better personal qualities with Clinton’s general magnanimity, relevant experience, and market-based approach, we might even have a marginally acceptable candidate instead of two gleaming turds.Report
Yeah.
At this moment in history, I’d say we apparently neither need nor want nor are able to produce heroic presidential leadership, but instead will get and accept one or another character too obviously flawed to make too much trouble – not that the next president will not be able to do a lot of damage, or that there are any guarantees in this biz.Report
This reflects more poorly on Marc Ambinder and the media in general than on Clinton.Report
This seems fair.Report
In the way that accepting bribes is worse than paying them, but it still doesn’t make the payer look great.Report
Yep.Report
Early access to a transcript is such a small payment for the complete surrender of Ambinder’s integrity. It’s not like Clinton had to play hardball: more like he was eager to roll over for even a puppy-sized milkbone.Report
This is right, but from my perspective it’s not so much that it’s supposed to reflect poorly on Clinton (certainly not on her personally – not on Clintonworld even – they’re absolutely supposed to be trying to get good press), as it is just material to her claims to be treated broadly unfairly by the press. This helps make clear they play ball with her just like they play ball with everyone else. At least, substantially so. (I would hope their claims of unfair treatment were taken with a grain of salt as they should be for most politicians – although evaluated on the merits in individual cases; unfair coverage can happen. But they’re not; they’ve been quite successfully promulgated as a meme by pro-Clinton media forces (formal & informal; traditional & social; paid & unpaid), to where it’s a signal of Clinton support to take as a matter of faith that the Clintons and especially Hillary have been treated egregiously unfairly by the media throughout their career – The “Clinton Rules” meme). So this instance, which is almost certainly not unique with Ambinder as an illustration of how the media work with Clinton and opticians generally, is materially relevant to such claims.)
It also speaks to which direction(s) any media “brainwashing” of the public regarding the Clintons may travel in.Report
As Virkam said, I’ll say less tactfully, the media are whores, no longer offering “objectivity”, if there was a time they ever did. Folks would do well to recognize that.Report