Hillary Clinton, at a small-business roundtable in Iowa, loses nothing by bypassing the traditional political press corps.
Chris Cillizza, the poster-child of
everything that is wrong about political journalism,
whines about lack of access to the Clinton campaign:
Do you not think it is of value to know how Hillary Clinton spent her time since leaving the State Department? And how the Clinton Foundation handled its business with various donors who would, undoubtedly, still be in the picture if she was elected president? Or what she thinks of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the fight currently happening in Congress? Or Iran? Or the Middle East?
You get the idea. The role of the media in this process is to show voters who these people are, really, and to explain how these people would govern the country if elected. Like the media or not, that’s a very important role — and one that is essential to a functioning democracy.
Such pompous bullshit from the asshole who once
wrote:
My job is to assess not the rightness of each argument but to deal in the real world of campaign politics in which perception often (if not always) trumps reality. I deal in the world as voters believe it is, not as I (or anyone else) thinks it should be.
Do voters need to be informed about Hillary's position on the Pacific trade deal? Of course. But no one is looking at Cillizza to deliver that information. He's even said he doesn't care whether an argument is right or not! Thankfully, in this day and age, he is as irrelevant as Mark Halperin's
insipid candidate scoring system.
The day when the political media was instrumental in getting a candidate's message out is over. Candidates now have myriad vehicles to communicate their message straight to the voters without having it wrung through the old media's filter. As consumers, this allows us to avoid the spin and biases of those reporters.
So who will ask the politicians the "hard questions"? Well, if by "hard questions" you mean ask whatever it is that has Fox News currently in a tizzy, then sure, the political hack reporters will do that. But if you're talking about things that actually matter to people, then don't hold your breath. The political press corps hasn't done that in forever.
The difference now is that no one reads their newspapers or watches their TV shows anymore. That era is over. In this age of social media, they genuinely don't matter. (And for the whiners, this response sums it up.)
So yes, if you're Hillary Clinton, you damn right ignore the dinosaur press corps. Fuck them. They haven't earned any respect, and there's nothing they can offer that is of any value to Hillary (or any other Democrat for that matter). And worst of all, there's nothing they can offer of value to the voters either.
It's now up to us and the partisan media to use modern media tools (like the social networks) to pressure our candidates to speak about the issues that we care about. It's not so easy as outsourcing it to the old press corps, but those guys weren't getting it done anyway.
