Every major presidential campaign is going to approach media relations in a different way, but as TNR’s Michael Crowley explained in a fascinating piece, Hillary Clinton’s team has crafted an aggressive press operation that perceives reporters as a combative enemy army, to be treated accordingly.
Reporters who have covered the hyper-vigilant campaign say that no detail or editorial spin is too minor to draw a rebuke. Even seasoned political journalists describe reporting on Hillary as a torturous experience. Though few dare offer specifics for the record–“They’re too smart,” one furtively confides. “They’ll figure out who I am”–privately, they recount excruciating battles to secure basic facts. Innocent queries are met with deep suspicion. Only surgically precise questioning yields relevant answers. Hillary’s aides don’t hesitate to use access as a blunt instrument, as when they killed off a negative GQ story on the campaign by threatening to stop cooperating with a separate Bill Clinton story the magazine had in the works.
Reporters’ jabs and errors are long remembered, and no hour is too odd for an angry phone call. Clinton aides are especially swift to bypass reporters and complain to top editors. “They’re frightening!” says one reporter who has covered Clinton. “They don’t see [reporting] as a healthy part of the process. They view this as a ruthless kill-or-be-killed game.”
Driven apparently by a combination of fear and disdain, the Clinton campaign keeps a tight lid on the flow of information, pushes back aggressively against media slights, and even badgers reporters a bit when they run reports on other candidates that the Clinton campaign disapproves of.
For the most part, it’s been a surprisingly successful strategy. “It’s one of the few times I’ve seen journalists respect someone for beating the hell out of them,” says a veteran Democratic media operative.
Crowley notes that Clinton’s media operation is not unlike George W. Bush’s in 2000, and as we know, that worked like a charm, too. Of course, I’d argue that the campaigns have very different motivations — Bush aides were worried that he’d flub every interview; Clinton aides are worried that reporters won’t treat their candidate fairly. Either way, both kept the press on very short leashes.
The TNR piece, however, is surprisingly value-neutral. The Clinton campaign is doing everything it can to control the media’s coverage, and “defeat” reporters. Is this a positive development or a discouraging one? Should presidential candidates “get tough with the press”?
I’m of the opinion that Clinton’s team probably doesn’t have much of a choice.
“Her ground-zero assumption is that [a reporter is] an asshole,” a senior aide to the senator told her biographer, Carl Bernstein. And why wouldn’t Clinton feel this way? As much as the media loves the Clintons for ratings and selling papers, the relationship between the Clintons and the fourth estate has been pretty awful since 1992. Hillary now looks at the media as an adversary — but given what she’s seen, what choice does she have?
Indeed, Greg Sargent highlighted a partial list of some of the nonsense we’ve seen from campaign reporters just over the last couple of months.
* Hillary’s alleged failure to tip the Iowa waitress
* Hillary’s phony southern drawl
* The supposed 20-year-plan by Hillary and Bill to take over the world, or at least deliver them both the Presidency, as alleged by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta and denied by the one person who supposedly had first-hand knowledge of their dastardly plot
* The baseless claim that Hillary eavesdropped on political opponents in 1992
* The bogus media claim that Bill Clinton accused Hillary’s Dem rivals of “swiftboating” her
* The media’s hyping of Hillary’s supposed refusal to release Presidential records, a tale that was taken apart in today’s Washington Post and which wasn’t matched by any similar media outrage about Rudy’s refusal to release his Mayoral papers
This doesn’t even include the painfully stupid analysis of Clinton’s laugh, scrutiny of her clothing, or John Solomon’s bizarre front-page expose on Hillary Clinton’s charitable donations.
Given this, the candidate has come to think of the media as adversaries. What a shock.
The defining quality of that machine is, simply, impenetrability. Reporting any story the Clintonites haven’t specifically encouraged can be like wading through mud. “Their rule is never to volunteer information — ever,” says one reporter who has experienced this. (Process stories are particularly verboten.) Another is a willingness to offer access to Clinton only under strictly controlled circumstances — as when she agreed to appear on the major TV networks the day her candidacy launched on the condition that the interviews be short and unedited, allowing precious little time for unrelated queries. In a testament to the enormous power of Hillary’s celebrity, her single greatest point of leverage with the media, no one refused.
Given what she’s seen, I don’t blame the campaign a bit.