And they still hate the press. Wemple’s jaw drops:
For the latest on how Clinton Inc. views the Fourth Estate, go no further than Amy Chozick’s update on how the media is moving around at the ongoing Clinton Global Initiative conference in New York. The highlights:
- Reporters must be escorted to the restrooms. Chozick reports that her minder “waited outside the stall in the ladies’ room at the Sheraton Hotel, where the conference is held each year.”
- “Hordes of journalists,” notes Chozick, have ended up “cloistered” in a Sheraton basement.
- Barricades separate journalists from the lobby, where “actual guests enter.”
- Escorts are required “wherever we go, lest one of us with our yellow press badges wind up somewhere where attendants with an esteemed blue badge are milling around.”
This bush-league totalitarianism appears somewhat recent: Though there were “always” tight security measures, Chozick writes, “reporters could roam relatively freely until last year, when interest in and scrutiny of the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation spiked amid speculation that Mrs. Clinton would run for president in 2016.”
Cillizza shares his own experience:
Regardless of who was to blame, by the end of the [2008] campaign, reporters — including me — and the Clinton operation were at each others’ throats daily and often more than daily. In the wake of that campaign — particularly as it became clear that Clinton was, in fact, interested in running again — some of those in Clintonworld promised a different approach to the press in 2016. No, Clinton would never be John McCain in the back of the straight Talk Express in 2000 but neither would she or her campaign repeat the mistakes of their dealings with the press in 2008. They understood, they insisted, that while Clinton was very well defined to most voters, there was an entire generation of younger people — who, not for nothing, were a pillar of Obama’s electoral success — who knew little about the former Secretary of State other than her famous name and would use the media coverage of her to form their opinions.
The early returns on those pledges don’t look promising.
Drum somewhat sympathizes with the Clintons:
Nobody should take this as a defense of the Clintons. High-profile politicians have always been gotten klieg-light treatment, and they have to be able to handle it. At the same time, there ought to be at least a few mainstream reporters who also recognize some of the pathologies on their own side—those specific to the Clintons as well as those that affect presidential candidates of all stripes. How about an honest appraisal—complete with biting anecdotes—of how the political press has evolved over the past few decades and how storyline reporting has poisoned practically everything they do?
I take Kevin’s point. The 1990s got way out of hand (and I played my part). But what you have to grasp is how the Clintons’ own fathomless paranoia actually enables this cycle, and perpetuates it. The kind of reporter-control the CGI imposes – even in the bathroom – is exactly the kind of thing that would make any journalist want to find out what the Clintons want to hide. In other words, I think the problem isn’t simply the press or the Clintons. It’s the toxic combination of the two that seems to bring out the worst in both.
The Dish 