September 12, 2016

Hillary Clinton and the Press: The Story in a Nutshell

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If you want to understand the relationship between Hillary Clinton and the press, yesterday pretty much gave it to you in a nutshell. The basic facts are these:

  • On Friday Clinton was diagnosed with pneumonia.
  • On Sunday morning she left a 9/11 memorial early, with her staff claiming she was “overheated.”
  • Later on Sunday Clinton’s doctor released a note revealing the pneumonia.

The press is rightfully annoyed. She’s a presidential candidate, and she should have disclosed the pneumonia diagnosis as soon as she got it. Those aren’t the rules for ordinary people, but they are the rules for presidential candidates, and once again Clinton is trying to slide by them.

So why did Clinton’s people try to hide her condition? That’s pretty easy: After months of baseless health speculation by Donald Trump’s rumor machine, she figured the press would go full National Enquirer over this. She didn’t trust them to handle it in a normal, level-headed way.

So that’s that. There’s a gulf of distrust between Clinton and the media that appears unbridgeable. Clinton doesn’t trust the press to treat her fairly, so she adopts a hyper-guarded attitude toward everything she does. The press doesn’t trust her to honestly disclose anything, so they adopt a hyper-skeptical attitude toward everything she says. Rinse and repeat.

I guess this could change. But not anytime soon.

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THE BIG PICTURE

You expect the big picture, and it's our job at Mother Jones to give it to you. And right now, so many of the troubles we face are the making not of a virus, but of the quest for profit, political or economic (and not just from the man in the White House who could have offered leadership and comfort but instead gave us bleach).

In "News Is Just Like Waste Management," we unpack what the coronavirus crisis has meant for journalism, including Mother Jones’, and how we can rise to the challenge. If you're able to, this is a critical moment to support our nonprofit journalism with a donation: We've scoured our budget and made the cuts we can without impairing our mission, and we hope to raise $400,000 from our community of online readers to help keep our big reporting projects going because this extraordinary pandemic-plus-election year is no time to pull back.

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