But those who say the episode is about Clinton’s alleged sense of entitlement have it wrong. This actually speaks to her hard-earned paranoia about what her opponents — and the media, which in her view so often play ball with them — are willing to do to destroy her. Her mistrust may be understandable in light of the past, but it is profoundly counterproductive.
It would be naive to suggest that being more open with the media always works in favor of the transparent politician. Clinton can highlight the fact that her much-praised answer-every-question news conference on Whitewater in 1994 failed to shut down the story. She also turned out to be right that no good would come the Clintons’ way from naming a special prosecutor to investigate the matter. [snip]
... To survive the next 20 months until Election Day, she will have to find her way toward a less viscerally antagonistic view of media scrutiny that distinguishes between partisan muggings and the sorts of questions all presidential candidates inevitably confront.
It may be true that recent days showed she has enemies and harsh critics not only among Republicans but also in mainstream media circles. But focusing solely on them will only encourage her to delay responding to legitimate inquiries and to write off advisers who counsel her toward a less-hostile approach to scrutiny.Just reading the
While the Republicans continue to play the media like a cheap violin, you also have the usual spineless Democrats wringing their hands and speaking on- and- off- the- record with the Jimmy Olsens of the Beltway Village. While it's a given that many in the Democratic Party and it's hangers-on in the consulting world are preternaturally skittish or are simply feeling left out, they need to remember the environment in which all of this is happening. Republicans, having nothing but a fully-loaded clown car of prospective nominees, are doing what they do best: trying to cut down the presumptive Democratic nominee as much as possible (and, yes, she will be the nominee if she wants it). Democrats need to get into their 2016 campaign mode fast because the Republicans (and their media megaphones) are already well into it.
BONUS: Paul Waldman says it all right here:
While the Clintons bear responsibility for getting many of those scandals going with questionable decision-making or behavior, it's also true that the mainstream media made huge mistakes during that period by treating every Republican charge, no matter how ludicrous, as though it was worthy of a full-scale investigation splashed across the front page. Again and again, they reacted to the most thinly justified accusations as though the next Watergate or Iran-Contra was at hand, and when it turned out that there was no corruption or illegality to be found, they simply moved on to the next faux-scandal, presented no less breathlessly.
That past — and journalists' failures to reckon with it — are still affecting coverage today. When this email story broke, how many journalists said it was important because it "plays into a narrative" of Hillary Clinton as scandal-tainted? I must have heard it a dozen times just in the past week.
Here's a tip for my fellow scribes and opinionators: If you find yourself justifying blanket coverage of an issue because it "plays into a narrative," stop right there. That's a way of saying that you can't come up with an actual, substantive reason this is important or newsworthy, just that it bears some superficial but probably meaningless similarity to something that happened at some point in the past. It's the updated version of "out there" — during the Clinton years, reporters would say they had no choice but to devote attention to some scurrilous charge, whether there was evidence for it or not, because someone had made the charge and therefore it was "out there." (our emphasis)
