Mark Halperin claims that the MSM has an "anti-Clinton bias." That might send the blood pressure of a Newsbusters reader rocketing. But before downing a diuretic, consider what else he and John Heilemann had to say on their Bloomberg TV show today.
Halperin and Heilemann were riffing off the New York Times report that Hillary's State Department permitted a rich Ecuadorian woman to enter the US after her family donated big bucks to Dem campaigns. According to the Bloomberg duo, there are 20-30 such stories out there, and the media will be eager to research them, with Hillary's scalp being a prime prize for an enterprising investigative reporter.
They're surely right that as a general matter, investigative reporters like to score political scalps. But how hard would the MSM really go after Hillary if the result would be to install a dreaded Republican in the White House?
It's a comparatively long video, but I'd encourage readers to view it. Could be a very interesting campaign if Hillary does hop in.
JOHN HEILEMANN: I think the main headline here is, boy, if Hillary Clinton is going to run for president, there is a lot to look at at the nexus of money and official action at the State Department, at her husband's foundation, the whole family, everything it's done, where money meets policy. There's a lot of stuff to look at. This is just the tip. I don't know what's there, but there is going to be a lot of investigation. This is just the beginning.
MARK HALPERIN: And the corollary of that is, when the Clinton people say to you and me, as they do all the time: oh, she's been scrutinized, there's nothing.
HEILEMANN: Crazy, crazy.
HALPERIN: I guarantee you if she runs, there's going to be new stuff from her time as First Lady of Arkansas. Just because she ran for president before, she's never been the nominee. When you're the nominee, other stuff is going to come out. And I'll tell you, the other thing is, maybe if Cuba hadn't happened, they would've felt more pressure to respond. But the other thing you learn is, her operation is not responding. They're just content to hope the story goes away. And it won't. Stuff like this needs to be explained.HEILEMANN: There have been very few good stories done about the Clinton foundation, President Clinton's foundation, alone, let alone places where that very global organization intersected with things that the State Department did. I've not seen hardly any of those pieces. You know, however damning they end up being, there are 20 or 30 of them to be done. Her time at the State Department got a lot of scrutiny, but not in this way. You didn't have political reporters writing about her at the State Department. You had foreign policy reporters, diplomatic reporters. This is a whole different kettle of fish.
HALPERIN: Here's her other problem. Every major news organization that still does investigative reporting, and there aren't very many, but the ones who do, they're going to say, we have our Democrats to investigate and our Republicans to investigate. And you divide it up amongst 14 Republicans: nobody's going to be hit that all that hard very often. Hillary Clinton, if she gets half the scrutiny and there's stuff there, and her operation again right now is not equipped to respond.HEILEMANN: Every major news organization that we know right now is getting ready, is getting their teams ready, and every single one of them knows that if Hillary Clinton is running and she is the class of the field, she's the de facto frontrunner, they're going to assign a lot of people to her. And that, just in terms of sheer volume of people looking, they are going to dig through a lot of these kinds of things.
HALPERIN: And let's be realistic about the way investigative reporters work. They basically want to knock the candidates out.
HEILEMANN: Sure.
HALPERIN: They want to expose skullduggery and malfeasance and all that. And their big thing is really damage the candidate and to get them out. That's the underlining mentality for people who do investigative reporting during a political campaign. Maybe it shouldn't be but it is. Again, you knock out Ted Cruz or you knock out Marco Rubio, eh, it doesn't really doesn't affect the race all that much. You knock out the Democratic front runner, that's a big scalp. There is an anti-Clinton bias in the press right now. This story I think is going to whet people's appetite, remind people that there's stuff out there to find and the Clinton operation isn't going to respond.
