It’s widely accepted among the national press that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a likely Democratic presidential candidate, has a long-soured relationship with the media. But there’s little evidence to suggest that the rapport is exceptionally tense compared to news media’s relationships with other politicians on the national level.
“Once somebody says something, it’s always the case,” said Nicole Krassas, a political science professor at Eastern Connecticut State University and co-author of Hillary Clinton: A Biography.
The consensus among politics reporters is that Clinton has a unique skepticism of the press and that skepticism has led to a contentious dynamic between her and the media ever since she first ran for the White House in 2008.
“[I]t’s hard to dispute that Clinton’s relationship with the media played a role in just how difficult — and disappointing — that campaign was for her,” Chris Cillizza, a politics blogger for the Washington Post, wrote last week.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner media desk, Krassas said Clinton’s relationship with the press is mixed but not necessarily unlike other politicians’.
“I think that being a senator and being a candidate [for office] and being a secretary of state, I don’t think her relationship with the press during those periods of time was more contentious,” she said. “I think it was less.”
“It appeared to me as an outside but educated observer that she was very accessible during the 2008 primary season,” Krassas said.
She said, though, that Clinton has been skeptical of the press since her days as first lady, when the media reported critically on her involvement with health care.
“It goes back to the conventional wisdom that Hillary is behaving in some way that’s inappropriate to her position and that was the often told story early in [then-president Bill Clinton’s] first term,” Krassas said. “There are things that the culture sort of puts in its mind about any one person and then that becomes the wisdom. So, anything that happens is viewed through that lens.”
But nearly every politician complains about the news media.
President Obama in 2012 complained that the press inaccurately portrays him as distant. “My suspicion is that this whole critique has to do with the fact that I don’t go to a lot of Washington parties” Obama told Time magazine, “and, as a consequence, the Washington press corps maybe just doesn’t feel like I’m in the mix enough with them, and they figure, well, if I’m not spending time with them, I must be cold and aloof.”
On more than one occasion, former New York Times editor Jill Abramson accused the Obama administration of being anathema to press freedom.
Republicans regularly complain that the media have a liberal bias. “It goes without saying that there is definitely media bias,” then-GOP Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan said in 2012. “I think most people in the mainstream media are left of center and, therefore, they want a very left-of-center president versus a conservative president like Mitt Romney.”
Clinton recently found herself the subject of countless reports scrutinizing her exclusive use of a personal email address during her tenure at the State Department, a practice that allowed her to retroactively select which electronic correspondence she wanted to release to the public.
Despite the negative attention, Clinton even joked about her email abuses at a journalism awards ceremony, and drew polite laughter from an audience of reporters.
“I am all about new beginnings,” she said. “A new grandchild, another new hair style, a new email account, why not a new relationship with the press?”
