I’m admittedly biased, but you can tell a lot about a politician by how they treat the press.
A candidate who doesn’t at least pretend to respect the Fourth Estate — which, by the way, deserves its low approval ratings — typically doesn’t respect the voting public (see Nixon, Bush 43 and their natural successor, Hillbot):
Reporters’ jabs and errors are long remembered, and no hour is too odd for an angry phone call. Clinton aides are especially swift to bypass reporters and complain to top editors. "They’re frightening!" says one reporter who has covered Clinton. "They don’t see [reporting] as a healthy part of the process. They view this as a ruthless kill-or-be-killed game."
And be wary of Hillbot’s media enablers (who happen to be former enemies):
Many reporters also suspect the Clinton camp of employing outside proxies to attack troublemakers in the media. After Hillary’s shaky debate performance late last month, the Drudge Report–whose author, Matt Drudge, the campaign has assiduously courted–quickly featured an unusual blind quote on its homepage in which an unnamed "top Hillary advisor" said debate moderator Tim Russert "bordered on the unprofessional." Joining in the attack on Russert was Media Matters, the liberal press-watching website founded by former Clinton-hater turned Clinton ally David Brock. Many in Washington believe the campaign feeds material to Brock’s site, as when Media Matters went after New York Times reporter Anne Kornblut last July after Kornblut misrendered a quote that led to an erroneous story claiming Hillary had criticized fellow Democrats. Not only did Clinton aides fume to the paper’s editors, but Media Matters pummeled Kornblut and the Times for several days. (A count of Media Matters stories from October found 39 headlines defending Clinton, compared to 15 for Obama and just one for John Edwards. A Media Matters spokesman strongly denied favoritism.
We’ve endured seven years of secrets from the executive branch. Can we afford four more?
(T)he Clinton machine, say reporters and pro-Hillary Democrats, is emulating nothing less than the model of the Bush White House, which has treated the press with thinly veiled contempt and minimal cooperation. "The Bush administration changed the rules," as one scribe puts it–and the Clintonites like the way they look.
