Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had a rotten day with the press Friday, and that was true even before reporters erupted in a feeding frenzy after the State Department released about 300 of her emails from when she served as secretary of state.
When it comes to the ongoing negative coverage for Clinton, it all starts with her unwillingness to speak with reporters. This Friday, it was particularly brutal.
Campaign events with Clinton are “staged” and her staffers will only admit supporters who are “pre-selected” and “pre-screened,” Associated Press reporter Julie Pace said Friday, reiterating a media complaint that is growing louder by the week.
Unsurprisingly, being tightlipped with reporters has not gone over well with newsrooms, but there are other issues that are starting to rub the press the wrong way.
For starters, there are questions surrounding the massive speaking fees that she and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have collected since they vacated the White House in 2001.
Reporters are interested, for example, in figuring out how the former first lady managed in a single day in 2014 to pull in $700,000 from “speaking fees.” She pocketed this amount exactly one day after she infamously said during her disastrous book tour that the former first family was “dead broke” when they left the White House.
MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski noted Friday during “Morning Joe” that the Clinton’s impressive wealth, and the family’s seeming inability to recognize when they’re being tone deaf about money, tends to “rub people the wrong way.”
There are also a growing number of questions about the foreign donations made to The Clinton Foundation when Clinton served as secretary of state, and about the events of Sept. 11, 2012, when U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, came under terrorist attack, resulting in the death of four Americans.
Taken together, the questionable ethics and the shady foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation, the Clintons apparently have little regard for the rules, the New York Times’ Nick Confessore said Friday morning, adding that the former first family simply doesn’t take “ethics agreements seriously.”
Later that day, after the State Department released a cache of emails from Clinton’s private server, media coverage of Candidate Clinton went from rough to worse.
The emails raise “eyebrows,” MarketWatch reported.
Other news groups were quick to speculate that the Democratic frontrunner may actually be in some serious trouble, with many noting well that the former secretary of state had, in fact, received classified information on her private and unauthorized server.
In short, the only time that Candidate Clinton was mentioned in the news Friday, it was for things that her campaign team would likely prefer that people forget. Considering her sinking polling with likely voters, perhaps Clinton is proving that all publicity is not necessarily good publicity.
Hillary’s cover up? http://washex.am/1HoT02m in Politics on LockerDome
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