Hillary Clinton’s most faithful surrogates have declared war on the New York Times, but the 164-year-old newspaper isn’t about to get knocked around by political flunkies.
Media Matters founder David Brock in his upcoming book, titled “Killing the Messenger: The Right-Wing Plot to Derail Hillary and Hijack Your Government,” accuses the Times of trying to sabotage Clinton’s 2016 presidential candidacy. He also claims that the newspaper has been turned into a “megaphone for conservative propaganda.”
“As it concerns Clinton coverage, the Times will have a special place in hell,” he writes, claiming that interviews with Times sources back his narrative that the newspaper is explicitly anti-Clinton.
At the heart of his criticism for the newspaper is its dogged reporting on the scandal surrounding the private email server Clinton used when the led the State Department. The server is now the focus of a criminal investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Brock goes after the Times’ former Washington bureau chief Carolyn Ryan especially hard, accusing her of harboring the deepest and most intense of anti-Clinton biases. Ryan “has a hard-on for Hillary,” and she “wants that coonskin nailed to the wall,” an anonymous source supposedly told Brock.
Meanwhile, Media Matters senior fellow Eric Boehlert has been raging on social media over the past few weeks, alleging that the Times is pursuing a vendetta against the former secretary of state.
“They revel in the dislike so why does anybody bother denying it?” he asked on Twitter Wednesday. “NYT is waging war on Dem front runner. Period.”
That same evening, Boehlert practically begged pro-Clinton Democrats to retaliate against the Times.
“[Question] is are Dems going to just watch NYT openly wage war on Dem frontrunner, or are Dems going to respond?” he asked. “Last time NYT waged war v Dem frontrunner it was Gore and most Dems/Dem pundits watched silently. A 2016 repeat?”
Prior to Boehlert and Brock coordinating to defend the Democratic frontrunner from the paper, fellow Clinton surrogate James Carville was on the “discredit the Times” beat.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., who heads the congressional committee investigating the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, “just feeds the New York Times stuff, and they put it in the paper,” Carville said last week in an interview with MSNBC.
“Just like the neocons fed the New York Times a bunch of bunk they put on the front page of the paper, basically helped start a war,” he added. “And you know, we go through these things all of the time. And of course the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and the cocktail party, the dinner party crowd, they get all out of breath and screaming and yelling at each other and turns out to be nothing.”
The Times, for its part, is not amused with the attacks, especially from Media Matters.
“David Brock is an opportunist and a partisan who specializes in personal attacks. His partisanship has led him to lash out at some of our aggressive coverage of important political figures and it’s unsurprising that he has now turned personal,” Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said in statement to the Washington Examiner’s media desk.
In reference to Ryan, Times reporter Amy Chozick, who covers the Clinton beat, told Politico: “Carolyn Ryan has edited nearly every story I’ve written about the Clintons since I moved to the beat in 2013.”
“She has always been a fair-minded, inspiring and brilliant editor who has never shown even a hint of bias (for or against) any candidate we cover,” she added. “I suppose being viciously attacked by both sides goes with the territory, but it is unfortunate that one of the best editors in the business is the target this time.”
