Rolling Stone’s Tessa Stuart interviewed New York Times campaign reporter Amy Chozick about her new book on covering the Hillary Clinton campaign, and revealed Chozick to be amazingly forgiving of Clinton and quite uncaring about female victims of male predation – at least those whose stories could conceivably hurt Hillary’s chances.
First, Chozick again apologized about her paper actually covering campaign news -- the leaked emails from the Clinton camp, purportedly obtained by sources in Russia:
[I think we need to ask ourselves:] What do voters or readers really need to know about these, can we confirm that they’re accurate, contextualize them. Can we be as transparent as possible about the source? Because sources usually have agendas -- almost always have some motivation – and can we be pretty clear about documents that have been not even "obtained," but stolen and released? I think we can be concerned about sourcing and confirm what’s really newsworthy versus just what’s salacious. There’s something in between juicy, salacious clickbait and ignoring the whole trove.
Then Chozick showed amazing leniency from the supposedly strong woman Hillary Clinton, who smeared her husband’s sexual harassment accusers as he ascended to the presidency and kept sliming them to help keep him in office. Chozick also demonstrated no empathy for female victims of male harassment, if they could conceivably hurt Hillary:
STUART: Is there something particular to Hillary Clinton, though, that she’s surrounded by all these awful men? Ronan Farrow, for instance, recently said she tried to cancel an interview after she learned he was reporting on Harvey Weinstein.
CHOZICK: I certainly don’t blame her for the bad-behaving men around her, but I do think there was a fascinating swirl of these alleged sexual abusers. Here was Hillary Clinton, married to an alleged sexual abuser, trying to defeat an alleged sexual abuser -- and then with the Anthony Weiner email story prompted the Comey letter and all that -- could lose because of this alleged sexual abuser. It was really something. I don’t blame Hillary that one of her donors was Harvey Weinstein, but Trump really took advantage of all of that: the way he used Bill Clinton as a human shield when the Access Hollywood tape hit. His first statement was 'Bill Clinton said far worse to me,' and he trotted out Bill Clinton’s accusers, which frankly at the time I really thought would help Hillary -- I really thought it would earn her sympathy. How could any woman watch that and watch what he’s putting her through and not think Trump is relentlessly bullying this poor woman whose already been through a lot in her marriage?
STUART: The question isn’t "Should Hillary be held responsible for Weinstein’s crimes because she cashed his checks?" The question is: "Should she be held responsible for withholding access to a reporter because he was working to expose Weinstein’s crimes?" That’s a specific decision. She made decisions -- when [she] stayed with Bill and counseled Huma Abedin, who ultimately stayed with Anthony Weiner -- to excuse certain behavior. I wonder if you think she bears some kind of responsibility for that?
CHOZICK: I don’t think so; I wouldn’t put the responsibility on her. What you’re telling me about her canceling or not doing the interview with Ronan, that to me just speaks to the sensitivity, the controllingness -- I don’t know what exchange was like, but I think if Hillary declined to do an interview it would be out of an abundance of caution.
Chozick herself admits in Chasing Hillary that her Clinton coverage was “neutral to positive, with plenty of wet kisses thrown in,” and one can certainly take that statement at face value.
