The mainstream press has mostly shied away from questioning the status of Hillary Clinton’s health, even as it has scrutinized the credentials of Donald Trump’s doctor and the legitimacy of the health information he has made public.
Despite a series of documented intense coughing fits during campaign events and media interviews throughout the campaign, mainstream reporters have generally not asked about it, and many journalists say the subject is inappropriate.
After NBC News reported Monday on a long coughing fit Clinton suffered during a rally in Cleveland, New York Times television critic James Poniewozik dismissed it as a non-story, even though Clinton suffered a concussion years ago and is known to take medication for an underactive thyroid.
“A person coughed,” he wrote on Twitter. “It’s news only because of a context of rumor, which NBC is indulging. This is how institutions fail.”
The Washington Post’s “The Fix” politics blog asked Tuesday, “Can we just stop talking about Hillary Clinton’s health now?” The blog called the subject a “totally ridiculous issue.”
The New York Times only covered the coughing fit in the context of how Clinton laughed it off as a matter of being “allergic” to her Republican opponent Donald Trump. “Hillary Clinton Treats Theories About Coughing Attack With Dose of Humor,” said the Times report, which called it an “allergy attack” at “an outdoor Labor Day rally.”
The report didn’t note that Clinton has suffered similar episodes in other indoor events, such as during a radio interview in April.
On Twitter, Trump commented on the news media’s reaction by charging that the “mainstream media never covered Hillary’s massive ‘hacking’ or coughing attack…”
Some reporters have, however, at least asked Clinton in person about the episodes. After the rally in Cleveland, one reporter aboard her airplane asked how her allergies were. Another asked if she’s taking any medication. (She said she is taking anti-histamine.)
Meanwhile, questions and analysis on the state of Trump’s health, both physical and mental, have been more frequent.
Trump late last year released a short general health evaluation from his physician that deemed the candidate to be in “extraordinary” health and said that over the course of almost 40 years, he had “no significant medical problems.”
When that happened, a skeptical New York Times article said, “While physicians are supposed to be advocates for their patients, a number of ethicists and historians have cautioned them not to become boosters or to distort or mislead the public when discussing the medical history of a patient who is politically active.”
MSNBC Rachel Maddow noted on her show that the doctor, Harold Bornstein, had identified himself as “a Fellow of the American College of Gastroenterology,” though he no longer is a member of that group.
Noting the hyperbolic language in the letter, an article in the Atlantic said in July that “Bornstein’s willingness to make such a claim suggests that Trump’s health may not have undergone legitimate scrutiny.”
In August, CNN medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta said that “there are some things in regards to his qualifications that are a little bit questionable.”
NBC recently interviewed Bornstein, who admitted that he wrote the health evaluation in five minutes.
Of that, the Washington Post’s “The Fix” blog, which called for an end of discussion on Clinton’s health, said, “Needless to say, this isn’t a fantastic way to write a sober-minded review of the health of a now-70-year-old man who could soon lead the free world.”
