The Media's "Clinton Rules"

Hat tip to Susie Madrak for pointing us to this article in Vox by Jonathan Allen that describes the media's approach - past, present and future - to Hillary Clinton:

The Clinton rules are driven by reporters' and editors' desire to score the ultimate prize in contemporary journalism: the scoop that brings down Hillary Clinton and her family's political empire. At least in that way, Republicans and the media have a common interest.

Allen gives the five rules reporters use in reporting on the Clintons, and how that will affect the 2016 campaign.  Madrak helpfully summarizes those "Clinton Rules":

1) Everything, no matter how ludicrous-sounding, is worthy of a full investigation by federal agencies, Congress, the "vast right-wing conspiracy," and mainstream media outlets.
2) Every allegation, no matter how ludicrous, is believable until it can be proven completely and utterly false. And even then, it keeps a life of its own in the conservative media world.
3) The media assumes that Clinton is acting in bad faith until there's hard evidence otherwise.
4) Everything is newsworthy because the Clintons are the equivalent of America's royal family.
5) Everything she does is fake and calculated for maximum political benefit.

It's no wonder the Clintons are deeply suspicious of the media;  they apparently have every reason to be so (and their rope- a- dope strategy of dealing with the press is looking better and better).  For anyone not already clued in, the media are not liberal and they're not honest.  They're corporate and they're amoral.

As proof of this, Madrak elsewhere has a piece about how a June 17 Politic-ho hit job took doctored emails from a Republican source on the Benghazi!!! committee and ran with a deliberately cut- and- paste version of several unrelated emails rather than bother to look at the originals:

As documents released by the State Department last week show, Clinton was actually intent on sending to the White House a Salon article claiming that the campaign of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was planning a brand-new line of attack based on Benghazi.

[Democratic Rep. Elijah] Cummings rips away, “It appears that this source fed Politico an inaccurate characterization of these emails and that Politico accepted this mischaracterization without obtaining the emails themselves. The source apparently took an email that was produced to the Select Committee in February, isolated Secretary Clinton’s statement about the White House, removed it from the original email exchange about the presidential debates, and then added it to a different email exchange involving Media Matters.” (our emphasis)

Now, one would think the media's interest would be in exposing the lying manipulators that would try to spread such spurious trash.   Please refer to "Clinton Rules" above.  

BONUS:  Wonkette has a funny piece about the penny-ante whiners in the press covering Clinton.