Politico senior reporter Glenn Thrush said Friday the conservative Daily Caller website was “dumb” to report on a sarcastic message he wrote on Twitter, in which he said Hillary Clinton’s presumptive presidential campaign is “collapsing completely” ahead of her expected presidential campaign announcement.
The Caller’s defense: We were just “trolling.”
The mixup happened Thursday when Thrush wrote on Twitter, “Yes, Hillary’s collapsing completely, shouldn’t even bother to enter the race…”
The tweet came as the former first lady, U.S. senator from New York and Obama administration secretary of state has seen her poll numbers plummet amid revelations that she conducted all State Department official business via a secret email address on a home server registered to a false name, an apparent violation of federal records law and norms for government correspondence. NBC News reported Friday that Clinton, who lost the 2008 Democratic nomination to Barack Obama, will make her 2016 White House bid official Sunday.
Thrush clarified in a follow-up tweet that his comment was made tongue-in-cheek, but only after Alex Griswold, a reporter at the Caller, wrote a story under the headline “Liberal Politico Reporter: Clinton Campaign ‘Collapsing Completely.'”
A link to Griswold’s story was featured prominently on the Drudge Report, a very powerful driver of web traffic, for most of the day.
“Let’s see how long the DailyCaller thing rides Drudge without a clarification,” Thrush tweeted in response to the story. “My bet is they won’t [adjust] the story because they want the [web] traffic.”
The Caller did, however, change the story to add Thrush’s followup tweets. “Bowing to a flurry of press attention, Thrush has now stated that he was joking about Clinton ‘collapsing,'” Griswold wrote.
“The story was trolling,” Griswold told the Washington Examiner. “I realized after the fact that the humor behind the piece relied on readers being in on the joke that Thrush was way too pro-Hillary to be serious. From my perspective, it was akin to a headline saying ‘Joe Biden thinks President Obama is the worst president of all time,’ but I think Thrush is too much of an inside-the-beltway guy.”
The Caller does have a reputation for antagonizing Democratic political operatives with deadpan stories, as well as creating friction with news reporters deemed liberal by Caller writers. (Editors at the Daily Caller recently came in for public opprobrium after co-founder Tucker Carlson’s brother inadvertently replied-all with a profane email about the spokeswoman for Democratic New York Mayor Bill deBlasio.)
Asked for proof of Thrush’s “pro-Hillary” bias, Griswold pointed to an incident two years ago wherein Clinton mistakenly referred to civil rights legend Medgar Evers as “Medgar Evans.” While some on the right called Clinton’s flub a “gaffe,” Thrush dismissed it as a “verbal typo.”
Reached for comment on Griswold’s story, Thrush said, “It was dumb yesterday and stupider today, dude. We got real news to cover.”
