Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton probably doesn’t expect fawning coverage from Fox News. But it looks like her worst enemy may turn out to be the New York Times.
Since the start of the year, the Times has broken the two stories that did the most to damage Clinton’s White House ambitions: the revelation that she conducted all her official business as secretary of state through an obscure email address hosted on a home server registered to an alias; and allegations from a new book claiming that the Clinton Foundation, a nonprofit she runs with her husband, might have served as a way to line her pockets.
In early March, Times reporter Michael Schmidt broke the news that Clinton had exclusively used a personal email address set up from her home address when she was secretary of state, allowing her to decide which electronic communications to turn over to the federal government. The story dominated the news cycle for weeks ahead of Clinton’s official announcement that she would run for president, forcing her to address the controversy in a 20-minute press conference, her first time taking political questions from reporters in nearly a decade.
Premier Times columnist Maureen Dowd, a ready Clinton critic, wrote of that story, “If you’re aspiring to be the second president in the family, why is it so hard to be straight and direct and stand for something? Why can’t you just be upright and steady and good?”
Dowd followed up in another column the following week, charging the Clintons with “always tangling up government policy with [their] own needs, desires, deceptions, marital bargains and gremlins.”
In a third column a few weeks later, Dowd said Clinton’s “paranoia, secrecy, scandals and disappearing act with emails from her time as secretary of state have inspired a cascade of comparisons with Nixon.”
The columns were featured on the popular and influential Drudge Report.
Before Clinton had fully recovered from the barrage of negative press on her past email practices, the Times dropped another bomb on Clinton: A report from Peter Schweizer’s upcoming book Clinton Cash, alleging that Clinton used her power at the State Department to grant favors to foreign entities in exchange for donations to her foundation.
Included in that report, by Amy Chozick, was a disclosure: “[M]ajor news organizations including The Times, The Washington Post and Fox News have exclusive agreements with the author to pursue the story lines found in the book.”
