Bill Clinton on Tuesday said the press favored Barack Obama over his wife for president in 2008.
Not surprisingly, he told Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly that he didn’t believe the media were biased towards him when he first ran for president in 1992 (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):
In the second segment of the interview, O’Reilly asked the former president, “When your wife was running against Barack Obama in New Hampshire, and this must bring back memories to you, the press favored Obama correct?”
Nodding his head Clinton responded, “Oh, I think yes.”
O’Reilly then asked, “Is that going to happen again? Is the American press going to favor Barack Obama over the Republican candidate?”
Clinton answered, “We’ll just have to wait and see.”
“You know the answer is yes,” said O’Reilly. “Now my question is why? Why does the American press favor the more liberal candidate?”
Unfortunately, when O’Reilly pressed for an elaboration, the former President said he didn’t want to wade into this given his wife being Secretary of State. This led O’Reilly to ask more generally, “Why is the media more liberal than conservative?”
“I don’t know that it’s always been that way,” Clinton answered. “For example, in 1992 when I ran, I was hardly the beneficiary of it in the primary.”
O’Reilly interrupted, “Not in the primary, but in the main you were.”
“I was the flavor of the day,” Clinton said. “You know, they always like what’s new, and they always like a conflict and always like a story. But nothing I can say will contribute to anything good happening in America. So I’m not going to contribute to that.”
Not surprisingly, Clinton didn’t want to address the media’s coverage of the general election after he became the Democratic nominee or how they allowed him to continue to talk about the economy being horrible despite the recession having ended in the 1st quarter of 1991 and actually booming in 1992.
As NewsBusters has reported for years, if the press had been honest about how the economy was doing back then, George H.W. Bush would have easily won reelection.
No one should be surprised that Clinton has no intention of admitting this 20 years later.
