Well, it looks like Hillary Clinton is moving onto the latest offensive in her rampage against those who she feels contributed to her defeat in the 2016 election: the media. At Recode in May, a tech conference in California, she said that the media covered her emails like it was Pearl Harbor. She also says that the press didn’t do their jobs last year, and that they “can’t bear to face their own role in helping elect Trump, from providing him free airtime to giving my emails three times more coverage that all the issues affecting people’s lives combined.”
Seriously, lady—weren’t you the one who attacked Trump on his temperament, his antics on the campaign stump, and the hot mic moment with that Access Hollywood tape, where he made some off-color remarks about women. No one cared about that last year, and no one cares about it now. The issues you felt were important, minimum wage hikes and a partial push for tuition-free college, all register miserably with voters. In fact, in the last debate, even Hillary-leaners trusted Trump’s economic talk more than your pitches, Madame secretary. You didn’t talk about the issues voters cared about; Trump did. He talked about trade, manufacturing, and job creation. You harped on a video of some locker room talk. It wasn’t the magic bullet. It was just a waste of your most valuable resource in all of politics: time.
Amy Chozick, a reporter for The New York Times who’s writing a memoir on the 2016 campaign, spoke to CNN’s Brian Stelter about Clinton’s remarks concerning the media. She agreed that the media doesn’t like to look inward and say that they’re wrong. Then again, she added “the way she [Clinton] presents it in the book is a little bit like it was our job to get Hillary Clinton elected.” Chozick added that it was the media's job to inform voters about the candidates and how their agenda will impact their lives. She admits that the press could’ve done better.Over at CNBC, John Harwood agreed with Clinton’s assessment on the media’s obsession with her emails, tweeting “there is no doubt media coverage exaggerated the significance of Clinton's e-mails in a way that was not just dumb but obviously ridiculous.”
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there is no doubt media coverage exaggerated the significance of Clinton's e-mails in a way that was not just dumb but obviously ridiculous https://t.co/uNlLrwAkqr
— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) September 17, 2017
No, Hillary was a presidential candidate. She skirted federal regulations on preserving these communications while she was secretary of state by having a private email server, and it is a story when a presidential candidate might have mishandled classified information due to security protocols not being followed. Thousands of emails on that server were retroactively classified, or up-classified, upon review by the FBI. At least three were classified at the time they were sent or received, but the Bureau said that they weren’t properly marked, though Hillary, as secretary of state, is an original classifying authority. She didn’t know what information could be considered sensitive? Moreover, maybe Clinton could have got in front of this fiasco, but her inability to come clean only increased scrutiny. Story after story that she doled out to explain why she had a private server fell apart within days due to contrary evidence. For example, she said she went to the State Department to say this private system was allowed, and that she got permission. The truth is that she didn’t ask and if she had, State Department officials would not have allowed it. It all relates to her judgment, which in this case, was incredibly poor. That matters.
Admitting that you suck is the first step to recovery. For Hillary, she’s afflicted with this notion that people like her. It’s a terrible addiction made all the more tragic that no one can really stand her and they hope she just goes away. For Democrats, they’re hoping she vanishes before she does more damage to the party.
Chozick is right; it’s not the media’s job to elect Hillary. That was her job and she failed. She was a terrible candidate, an atrocious campaigner, and the results were very much in line with those qualities.
Oh, and she did call her email server as her "most important" error, but whatever.
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