Washington Post: Clintons Continuing Media Disdain

The Clintons neither like the national media or feel any need for dealing with it, even as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appears to be headed for a White House run in 2016, says an opinion piece in Friday's edition of The Washington Post's "The Fix" blog.

Reporters "describe a candidate and an operation that always assumes the worst of the press horde and acts accordingly" when it comes to the Clintons, writes Post political blogger Chris Cillizza. He writes that their well-documented aversion has even included a press aide for the Clinton Global Initiative escorting New York Times journalist Amy Chozick to a restroom.

And while the escort may have been an "extreme example" of the press rules at the event, Cillizza says, it still reflects the "dark and, frankly paranoid view the Clintons have toward the national media."

In April, CNN reported Bill Clinton describing the political press as having a "craving that borders on addictive" to present a storyline on a politician. And once there is a storyline, said Clinton, the craving "borders on blindness to shoehorn" everything into the storyline, even if there is no real connection.

But Hillary Clinton, said Cillizza, may need the national media and political press "as little as any person seeking the presidency in modern memory," as she is already well-known.

Further, he said, she can use modern technology to "avoid the media filter" when she wants to connect with voters.

"The media — as viewed by the Clintons — is, at best, a neutral factor and, much more often, a negative," Cillizza writes.

But the "remarkably adversarial relationship" hurt Clinton when she ran in 2008, said Cillizza, and while it didn't determine the outcome of the election, it also did not help her, as "access to the candidate was non existent."

Further, questions were ignored or "treated as adversarial," he writes. And as the media also pushed harder on Clinton than even on then-Sen. Barack Obama, it left them cynical.

The Obama team also was not particularly press-friendly, he writes, which has hindered the president as his national popularity began to wane.

Clinton's camp has promised not to repeat its mistakes from 2008, as there is a whole generation of voters who know little about her beyond what the media would report, said Cillizza, but the "early returns on those pledges don't look promising."

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