It's only July of 2014, but two panelists on the Morning Joe program expressed concern during Thursday's edition that people within the media are already suffering from “Clinton Exhaustion” even though the former secretary of state has yet to announce whether she will be a candidate in the 2016 presidential election.
If that's the case, then one of the worst offenders is the staff of that MSNBC morning show, which usually finds a way to spend up to 15 minutes a day discussing the latest “news” about Hillary Clinton, ranging from her “Hard Choices” book -- which is suffering from poor sales -- to question if she's a victim of “sexism” and “ageism.”
The segment began when frequent contributor Mike Barnicle asked Chuck Todd, the chief White House correspondent for NBC News, a curious question:
It's July of 2014, but do you sense, within the media, already right now, “Clinton Exhaustion,” just from covering the early stages of not even a campaign yet?
Todd, who is also the host of The Daily Rundown program on the “Lean Forward” cable network, replied that “one of the Clinton campaign's unique challenges” is the fact that many individuals in the press corps “have covered the same group of people for 25 years.”
As a result, he noted, the Clinton family has been covered by the media “for their entire existence on the national political stage.”
“We reporters are human beings, too,” Todd added. “You react in human ways,” which “is going to be an interesting challenge for the Clinton campaign” if the former senator from New York eventually throws her hat in the presidential ring.
The feeling of being familiar with Hillary Clinton is “going to be one of the probably constant frustrations in dealing with the press,” which Todd broke down into two segments: “the new press corps versus the old press corps.”
The Clintons are “going to like the older press corps because they're going to feel like 'in the good old days, they at least dealt with things this way, they gave us time,' and then there's 'parts of the new way, the new press corps, the instant gratification that they're not going to like at all.'”
Soon after that discussion ended, Evan McMurry of the Mediaite website listed many things Morning Joe has covered, including Hillary Clinton's “book-tour-cum-candidacy-prelude” almost every day, “devoting anything from five to fifteen minutes of each hour’s A-block.”
McMurry added that the MSNBC program has reported on Hillary Clinton's “gaffes, her foreign policy, her money awkwardness, her speeches, her hints about running” and “her ability to relate to the middle class.”
Part of the program's coverage has included possible challengers, including Elizabeth Warren, the senior U.S. senator from Massachusetts, and Clinton's poll numbers against vice president Joe Biden, New Jersey Republican governor Chris Christie and “the rest of the GOP field.”
As if that wasn't enough, McMurry said Morning Joe has also reported on Clinton's “approval rating, her effect on female candidates, her naturalness, the role of her husband, her coziness to Wall Street, whether she’s a neocon, etc., etc.”
During the past several months, NewsBusters has covered many program segments that have dealt with the 66-year-old Democrat, such as April 10, when guest Bill Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine, asked: “What achievement, one sentence, what has Hillary Clinton done? What's her achievement in politics that qualifies her to be president of the United States?“
No one on the panel, including liberal co-host Mika Brzezinski, was able to list one accomplishment made by Clinton, with John Heilemann of New York Magazine proclaiming “when her book comes out in June that that's one of the questions that book is going to try to answer.”
Eight days later, the pundits scolded guest Andrew Ross Sorkin for suggesting that Hillary Clinton should use the birth of her granddaughter to “soften her image.”
During the tour to promote her book, Clinton told interviewer Diane Sawyer that she and her family were “dead broke” when they left the White House.
That led co-host Mika Brzezinski to hammer the people defending Hillary Clinton's comment as being “afraid” of the former secretary of state and “a slush of sycophantic suck-ups.”
On June 18, the program's panelists hyped the “very, very, very big news” of senator Claire McCaskill -- a Democrat from Missouri -- endorsing Clinton more than two years before the November 2016 election.
Perhaps the people on Morning Joe would worry less about media “fatigue” regarding Hillary Clinton if they spent more time on actual news and less on being an extension of her presidential campaign -- especially since she doesn't have one, at least not yet.
