Hillary Clinton and the Press: The Story in a Nutshell

Support Mother Jones

"The profit is the product": Read how hedge funds are decimating newsrooms at a time when quality reporting is needed more than ever—and if you're able to, please help Mother Jones raise $400,000 so we can do all of the reporting this crazy pandemic-plus-election year demands.

"The profit is the product": Hedge funds are decimating newsrooms just when quality reporting is needed more than ever. If you can, please support Mother Jones’ journalism, which exists to make a difference, not a profit, during this critical moment.

For indispensable reporting on the coronavirus crisis and more, subscribe to Mother Jones' newsletters.

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.