NewsBusters readers presumably would laugh at the proposition that the media are biased against Hillary Clinton, but plenty of liberals, including Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum, believe it.
In a Tuesday post, Drum, regarding the media’s fascination with Hillary’s “dead broke” remark, wrote, “Hillary could have responded to questions about her wealth a little better. She's not the natural politician Bill is. But really, there's not much else here. So why does it continue to be news a full month later?” Drum then touched on Mark Halperin’s recent comment on Morning Joe that “the press loves to cover [Hillary] hard.” Halperin also said on another recent Morning Joe broadcast that Hillary is “destined to get horrible coverage if she runs for president.” Drum went on (emphasis added):
[Liberal blogger] Bob Somerby [has] been following this ever since the initial flood-the-zone coverage of Hillary's "gaffe" in the Washington Post. Somerby tells the rest of the story:Multimillionaire TV stars asked if voters would support a person as wealthy as Clinton. In response to Clinton’s answers, some of the nation’s most famous pundits launched their famous “gaffe culture.”
The Washington Post even launched a front-page jihad concerning the size of Clinton’s speaking fees. In the New York Times, Maureen Dowd assailed Clinton for her “rapacious” behavior and her “wanton acquisitiveness,” which she was said to be passing along to her daughter…
The media's preoccupation with the Clintons' wealth won't last forever. Even for the Washington press corps, it's too transparently silly to pretend that it's somehow surprising that a presidential candidate is wealthy. But Somerby and Halperin are right: it's a sign of things to come. The press has never liked Hillary, and she's never liked them, and that's that. If she decides to run for president, this is going to be one of her biggest problems—or maybe her biggest, period. She's just never going to catch a break.
On his own blog, Somerby, a Harvard buddy of Al Gore who believes that “the press corps' twenty-month war against Gore almost surely” put George W. Bush in the White House, followed up on Drum’s post (emphasis added):
Will Clinton ever catch a break if she runs for president? We wouldn’t make a hard-and-fast prediction, although the Washington Post’s recent jihad has been remarkable and sobering.
We also wouldn’t be sure that “the media's preoccupation with the Clintons’ wealth won't last forever.” In the past, they have shown that they will maintain lunatic claims for years at a time, unless and until they are somehow made to stop…If a Republican front-runner was being beaten up this way, the screaming would have been heard from coast to coast by now. But on the One True Liberal Channel [MSNBC], the millionaire children have all been silent…
