Media Enforce Clinton Rules Even After The Election

Since we seem to be rehashing the 2016 election today with James Comey's testimony on his actions before the election and Hillary Clinton's comments yesterday, we get a chance to see one more classic example of the Clinton Rules when it comes to the media. Taken together, Comey and the Clinton Rules pretty much sum up the entire election campaign.

In an interview with Christiane Amanpour which covered a whole range of issues mostly concerned with empowering women, Clinton was unsurprisingly asked about the election and provided an honest mea culpa on the result, saying, "I take absolute personal responsibility. I was the candidate, I was the person who was on the ballot. I am very aware of the challenges, the problems, the shortfalls that we had." She later added, citing multiple analyses and specifically Nate Silver, that she felt James Comey's letter swung the election away from her. She added that with an election result that was as close as it was, any number of factors could be pointed to as decisive but that Comey's actions moved the electorate more than anything else that is remotely quantifiable. According to Clinton, "I was on the way to winning until the combination of Jim Comey’s letter on October 28 and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me but got scared off — and the evidence for that intervening event is, I think, compelling [and] persuasive."

Later on in the interview, Hillary discussed her mistaken belief that the policies she had proposed would get more traction and specifically cited the importance of infrastructure, making the rather obvious point that it is hard to bring significant businesses into an area "if you don't have access to high-speed affordable broadband, which large parts of America do not. If you drive around in some of the places that beat the heck out of me, you cannot get cell coverage for miles. And so, even in towns — so, the president was in Harrisburg. I was in Harrisburg during the campaign, and I met with people afterward. One of the things they said to me is that there are places in central Pennsylvania where we don't have access to affordable high-speed Internet."

And with that we were off. Here is the tweet from the New York Times' Glenn Thrush: "Hillary takeaways 1) Loathes Trump 2) blames Comey/Putin 3) the 'real' Hillary-funny, hard-edged, unguarded 4) blames everyone but self". Of course, the very first thing Clinton said is that she is ultimately responsible for her loss, but no matter. Here is Phil Elliott of Time Magazine: "'You cannot get cell coverage for mile,' Clinton says of the places that voted against her", implying she was blaming that fact for her loss. Here is Zach Wolf from CNN: "Clinton NOW talking about Pennsylvania, rural cell service. Uhhh." Of course, providing high-speed broadband to every area of the country was an integral part of Clinton's infrastructure plan but that's not nearly as sexy or important as emails. And here is Philip Rucker in the Washington Post saying, "Yet the Democratic nominee declined to fault her strategy or message, nor did she acknowledge her own weak­nesses as a campaigner or the struggles by her and her advisers to at first comprehend and then respond to the angry mood of broad swaths of the electorate." In fact Clinton made it very clear in the interview that her campaign made their share of errors and mistakes.

What's clear about every one of these reporters is that they never bothered to listen to the whole interview with Clinton. They just took the few comments that got quoted and tweeted and reflexively painted Clinton in the worst light possible. And that is pretty much how most of the media treated her entire campaign.