Reporters have been
beside themselves over the fact that Hillary Clinton is all but ignoring them. A piece of me sympathizes. I know what it’s like to be trying to cover a campaign but having a hard time getting interviews with the candidate. Still, at some point you have to retool, get creative, and find other meaningful ways to inform your readers.
Since Hillary 2.0 is clearly focused on meeting with voters in these roundtable settings (which I personally think is a good thing), the media should just embrace it. Clinton did a very memorable and defining roundtable on immigration, so a great series for some enterprising reporter would be, what other roundtables might she do, what does her progressive base want to hear about, and how might her positions play in a general election?
This would give reporters an opportunity to prime readers on the issues and questions that journalists might otherwise ask the candidate but can instead explore through a mix of interviews with voters and experts and interest groups.
So let’s imagine some potential roundtables: the environment, minimum wage, criminal justice reform, LGBT equality (beyond marriage rights), further Wall Street reforms, foreign policy, trade policy, welfare reform, shoring up Social Security, paid leave/workplace equality issues for women, maybe student loan reform and making secondary education more affordable. What am I missing here? (Happy for suggestions in the comments.)
These are areas where reporters could do a deep dive, both figuring out what Clinton’s progressive base would like to hear, what the policy hurdles are to accomplishing certain goals, and what points Clinton would really need to be pinned down on in order achieve a meaningful pledge on which she can be held accountable.
This could offer a totally different route to informing readers about what they know, don't know, and still need to know about a candidate. Instead of waiting for the candidate to come to readers through interviews, reporters could simultaneously report on the issues and bring voters' concerns to the candidate through the press.
For more on covering Hillary 2.0, head below the fold.
In fact, in some ways, Clinton's campaign style reflects a new approach to engaging a different electorate. Instead of trying to reach a lot of the general public through mainstream press or even arena-style speeches, she is leaning into connecting with individual constituencies in smaller public settings. Democrats used to do the exact opposite—they would give general press interviews while often opting to meet with progressive constituencies behind closed doors, where they couldn't be pinned down publicly on certain positions.
Of course, many reporters see the roundtables as an inferior style of campaigning. Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post had the hubris to make this claim:
While answering questions from hand-picked audience members is not without value, no one could possibly think it is the equivalent of answering questions from the working press.
That's ridiculous. While I do think reporters—and especially constituency reporters—can bring something important to the conversation, they also often get sidetracked with things like
Clinton Cash and Hillary's
email account, which add little value to the discussion of issues that real people care about.
The Dreamers, by comparison, were focused like a laser beam at their event. They knew exactly what they wanted to hear and nailed down Clinton on executive action, immigration reform, detention issues, and even got her to answer a question on the timing for immigration legislation. She ultimately said she wouldn't commit to passing immigration reform in her first year, but that was as good an answer as a journalist could have gotten.
The point is, if Clinton is going to meet with particular constituencies on issues they truly care about, then she will likely get questions that achieve about as much clarity and perhaps more than any reporter could achieve. And while some have criticized the fact that her campaign is pre-screening the people who ask the questions, that’s not near as worrisome as if they were pre-screening the questions that get asked.
The potential downside to this campaign model for voters is that it gives candidates more control over which subjects they choose to address. So Clinton could do a handful of roundtables on great topics but avoid doing any on foreign policy or trade policy, for instance, each of which could prove to be a very difficult needle for her to thread with the Democratic base.
But Clinton is by no means cheating the electoral process by declining to grant interviews to mainstream reporters. The only tradeoff is, if she’s going to substitute voter roundtables for press access during the primary, then activists should hold her accountable for addressing a wide array of Democratic issues in those settings.