Hillary Clinton has not made herself available to one specific part of the media in one specific way for 271 days, and the media is Not. Letting. It. Go. Clinton has done hundreds of interviews, plus one press conference with black journalists, but none of that counts. She has not done a press conference with the reporters who follow her around every day yearning to ask important questions about Anthony Weiner and whichever poll shows her leading by the lowest margin, and therefore, as far as they’re concerned, she is lacking in transparency and hiding from the press and just generally terrible.
This issue is so pressing that, Thursday morning, when Tim Kaine did a series of interviews to talk about Donald Trump’s rather newsworthy, hate-filled immigration speech, he ended up spending a lot of time talking about Clinton’s lack of press availability that white national political reporters count.
"You see Hillary take questions from reporters every day. She does—she talks to the press everywhere she goes," Kaine responded.
Co-anchor Norah O'Donnell, off-screen, asked, "Really?"
"That's not true - no matter how you count her availabilities," CNN reporter Dan Merica tweeted, cc'ing traveling press secretary Nick Merrill.
Clinton does a lot of interviews with local media—and often faces tough, substantive questions in those interviews—and has also done individual interviews with national outlets like CNN and MSNBC. But the cool kids of the national media demand that they get to shout questions at her, just like the reporters in the movies do, or it doesn’t count.
At this point, I hope Clinton trolls these whiners by refusing to do a single press conference for the rest of the campaign, while doing two and three interviews a day with reporters outside their clique.