Noonan: For MSM, To Know Hillary Is Not to Love Her

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People are figuring Hillary Clinton out. And that's a problem. At least, it is if you're Hillary Clinton. That's a theme of Peggy Noonan's Wall Street Journal column of today, Getting Mrs. Clinton. Along the way, the indispensable Ms. Noonan dispenses numerous valuable insights into Hillary's persona. From our NewsBusters perspective, of particular interest were these paragraphs on the way the MSM has come to view her, and vice versa [emphasis added].

Many in the press get it, to their dismay, and it makes them uncomfortable, for it sours life to have a person whose character you feel you cannot admire play such a large daily role in your work. But I think it's fair to say of the establishment media at this point that it is well populated by people who feel such a lack of faith in Mrs. Clinton's words and ways that it amounts to an aversion. They are offended by how she and her staff operate. They try hard to be fair. They constantly have to police themselves.

Not that her staff isn't policing them too. Mrs. Clinton's people are heavy-handed in that area, letting producers and correspondents know they're watching, weighing, may have to take this higher. There's too much of this in politics, but Hillary's campaign takes it to a new level.

So apparently it's not just a case of that Obama-inspired tingle running up the MSM's collective leg. It's also the media experiencing sensations of a very different sort after close encounters of a Clinton kind.

I'll leave you to savor the remainder of the column on your own, but can't resist sharing one more marvelous morsel [emphasis added]:

She [falsely claimed to have] landed in Bosnia under siege and bravely dodged bullets. It was as if she'd watched the movie "Wag the Dog," with its fake footage of a terrified refugee woman running frantically from mortar fire, and found it not a cautionary tale about manipulation and politics, but an inspiration.

Ouch.

Bonus Coverage: Mika's Sub a Switch from Collins to Krauthammer

Over at Morning Joe, Savannah Guthrie is sitting in today for Mika Brzezinski. During the portion of the show in which the panelists share their top headlines of the morning, Mika almost invariably focuses on lib-friendly items. Yesterday, for example, Brzezinski enthused over a Gail Collins column. When it came Guthrie's turn this morning, she chose a column by . . . Charles Krauthammer, writing in the Washington Post. Not to accuse Savannah, a magna cum laude grad of Georgetown law school, of a rightward tilt, but it was a refreshing little change of pace.