Another day, another Hillary Clinton for president story by the Washington Post. On Monday, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton officially joined Twitter. Today, the Post devoted a 26-paragraph puff piece to this development and on the front page no less.
Staff writer Philip Rucker all but begged Hillary to run for president in his story headlined “One-tweet wonder draws followers, and anticipation.” Contrast that with how Post editors allotted a mere 12 paragraphs to an Anne Gearan piece on explosive allegations about drugs and prostitution use by diplomatic security staffers who protected Mrs. Clinton. That story, blandly headlined "State Dept.'s handling of cases reviewed," was placed on page A2.
Not only did Rucker's prose puff up Clinton, Post editors made sure to include a Getty Images photo of a sunglasses-wearing Clinton texting on a smartphone. Beneath that image, which Clinton uses for her Twitter profile picture, editors breathlessly informed readers that Clinton has tweeted just once but gained a total of 293,033 followers as of 11 p.m. Monday night.
"She's news incarnate," Rucker quoted former Bill Clinton adviser and Democratic Party hack Paul Begala in the fifth paragraph.
The piece serves as nothing more than an informal campaign advertisement for Ms. Clinton, with just two miniscule paragraphs devoted to her declining popularity resulting from her failed handling of the terrorist attack in Benghazi. Instead, Rucker hyped how:
Perhaps no figure in American political life has surfaced on Twitter quite the way Clinton did. But none shares her position in the public arena right now as a potential president-in-waiting.
As if that weren’t enough, Rucker expressed that he truly is in the Hillary for President camp:
With her emergence on Twitter, Clinton tried to stake out turf above all that. She is defining herself not as a staid politician but as a witty, self-effacing and almost hip netizen.
Unlike the fluff piece on Clinton’s Twitter debut, the piece on recent State Department scandals by fellow Post Hillary puffer Anne Gearan is yawn-inducing. In a brief 12-paragprah story, the Post details how there are allegations that:
Security agents assigned to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton regularly hired prostitutes while traveling on the job and that a sitting ambassador was suspected of soliciting prostitutes in a public park.
It's hard to imagine that if Condoleezza Rice were exploring a presidential bid and had both Benghazi and now these new allegations haunting her that the Post would give her the royal treatment they've given Mrs. Clinton.
