Why Does Camp Hillary Push Back Against Media So Aggressively?
November 13, 2007 -- 10:27 AM EST // //
The New Republic's Michael Crowley has posted an engaging piece about Camp Hillary's strategy for dealing with the media. His basic take is that Hillary's advisers view the press as a hostile foe to be defeated at all costs.
Why does Camp Hillary treat the press this way? One political reporter Crowley talks to offers this explanation: "They've cultivated this attack-machine image because they think that Democrats want that."
It's true, as I've noted here before, that one of the unheralded developments of Campaign 2008 has been that all the leading Dems, and not just Hillary, have made aggressive pushback against both the traditional and wingnut media a key part of their efforts to court Dem primary voters who have had it with the media's maltreatment of Dems over the years. Such pushback has gone mainstream in Dem primary politics.
That larger context aside, it's really not hard to explain why Camp Hillary is so aggressive with the media: The Clintons have been getting slimed by the big news orgs for over 15 years. Just look back over Campaign 2008 alone and ponder all the bogus Hillary stories we've had. Here's a partial list:
* 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
And on and on. Putting aside the Hillary campaign's more routine efforts to spin the press, the real story here is that the Clintons have been swimming against the media slime-tide for far longer than any of her Dem rivals. As a result they have a more immediate grasp of the media echo chamber/Freak Show dynamic at play, which is that once bogus stories are injected into the media bloodstream there's literally nothing that can get pundits and commentators -- and even some self-described journalists -- to stop repeating it.
John Edwards and his hair know this, and Obama the flag-pin-hating Muslim is learning it, but the Clintons have been living and breathing it for years and years.
You don't have to naively assert that the Clintons are merely passive victims of the press or deny that the Clinton camp aggressively tries to spin the media to its advantage to acknowledge this fundamental media state of play. With the Freak Show there's literally no room for error -- once a story gets written into the Freak Show's script there's no going back. So the idea is to move as quickly as possible to strangle these stories before the Freak Show gets a hold of them. This is what's largely driving Camp Hillary's aggressiveness with the press. No mystery here.
To reach the homepage of this blog, click here. Comments section temporarily disabled.