Anyway, this is the polite version of the face I made when reading this article.
reporters really aren't bothering to hide their loathing of Hillary Clinton anymore, to the point where the next logical step is for the newspaper to adopt the mottoes "fair and balanced" or "we report, you decide." Here's how one
Times reporter tweeted his latest article:
Yeahhhh, Queen Hillary. "We report, you decide!"
As for the article itself ...
Unlike in 2008, when Mrs. Clinton’s regal bearing was brought low by Barack Obama’s insurgent campaign, there is no one to force her out of her Rose Garden. Neither Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont, nor Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland, has applied significant pressure on her. That leaves the news media as her only real opponent so far on the way to the Democratic presidential nomination, and while it may not be great for an educated populace or the furtherance of American democracy, it makes all the political sense in the world for Mrs. Clinton to ignore them, too.
"That leaves the news media as her only real opponent so far." It's a
horrible premise, as Jay Rosen among others has made clear. But boy is it ever a premise Jason Horowitz does his best to live out in an article with personal animus oozing from under every line.
Here's how Horowitz describes Clinton taking press questions, as they'd been endlessly whining she was not doing:
“Tell me — tell me something I don’t know,” she said, almost musically, as she snapped her head to the left in a Janet Jackson-era dance move. “Ha, ha, ha, ha.”
The smile on Mrs. Clinton’s face slowly faded as she nodded and replied and obfuscated in response to the half-dozen questions asked of her.
Later in the piece, "She seems less a presidential candidate than a historical figure, magically animated from a wax museum to claim what is rightfully hers." So, Janet Jackson-era dance moves and a historical figure magically animated from a wax museum—she's old! To claim what is rightfully hers—Queen Hillary, so entitled! How dare she be a strong presidential candidate when we, the press, don't like her?
The entitlement here is on the part of the press, claiming a role in politics that does not belong to it by any reasonable read of the role of the press, with reporters insisting that their inane questions and picayune obsessions are what's important in this race. Insisting that, rather than covering Bernie Sanders' campaign as seriously as they're covering the campaigns of Republicans with lower polling numbers than Sanders, the right way to cover the Democratic primary is by dismissing Sanders and setting themselves up as Clinton's true opposition. It's disgraceful.
