The biggest threat to Hillary Clinton winning the presidency, Politico's Dylan Byers writes, is a scandal. A real one, about something voters care about. And Byers thinks it's
a possibility that can't be ignored because:
First, the national media have never been more primed to take down Hillary Clinton (and, by the same token, elevate a Republican candidate). Even before she announced her presidential bid, The New York Times alone had published more than 40 articles related to her private email account, spurring other stories across the national print, digital and television media. Since announcing her bid, the national media have spent the bulk of their time investigating potential lines of influence between Clinton Foundation donations/speaking fees and Clinton's actions as secretary of state. The Times, The Washington Post and others even struck deals for early access to anti-Clinton research.
That's quite a thing for a media reporter at an insidery political media outlet to write. "The national media have never been more primed to take down Hillary Clinton (and, by the same token, elevate a Republican candidate)." I mean. There's an implicit acknowledgement that the national media have previously been somewhat primed to take Hillary Clinton down, and then there's the statement that now they're
more primed to do so.
You don't have to be a genius to see this—many reporters and newspapers (see: New York Times) have been fairly open about it. But when it's glaring enough that reporters at hacky Beltway publications are talking openly about it as an established fact, the desire to take Clinton down has gone supernova. Clinton's campaign is less than a month old and already we've seen sustained efforts to create two separate scandals (one of those efforts predating her campaign announcement). As much as the Republican candidates are obsessed with running against Clinton, the media may be more so. Which you'd think might prompt some soul-searching from the traditionally respectable outlets, but unfortunately, they seem to be too busy trying to manufacture the next scandal.
