Reporters Beware: A Hillary Presidency May Require a LOT of Rolling Oranges
This is not an article about Hillary Clinton’s health, so get that right out of your head. This article is about how the candidate, or more specifically her handlers, have reacted to questions about her health, and how that reaction bodes for a potential Clinton presidency.
The relationship between the press and the White House is an important one. In a representative democracy, the people have a right to know what their government is up to; it’s the only way they can make informed decisions about how to vote in subsequent elections. It is therefore in the interest of both the public and the country as a whole that reporters be granted a certain latitude in covering the presidency, even (especially) if that coverage is not always favorable to the commander in chief.
Yet, press freedom in this area has not been ideal in recent years. President Obama has a notoriously frosty relationship with any news organization willing to criticize him, to the point of actually trying to exclude whole networks (Fox) from press conferences and other official events. While he is happy to grant plenty of time to fawning talk show hosts and comedy shows, Obama’s unwillingness to be scrutinized by more serious media has made his promise to run “the most transparent administration in history” a pathetic joke.
One would hope that the next administration would be a little less hostile towards journalists, but if Clinton manages to defeat Donald Trump in November, don’t count on it. She has already earned the ire of many press outlets by refusing to grant access. In fact, she is so walled off from reporters, that members of the press literally rolled an orange with a question written on it down the aisle of her plane — just to get a question to her! Likewise, she has been suspiciously reclusive, when most candidates would want to spend as much time as possible getting face time with the public. It is this reclusiveness, in part, that has contributed to persistent rumors about Clinton’s health; rumors to which she has not reacted well.
As The Hill reports, several members of Clinton campaign team are pushing back aggressively against reporters who dare to question her physical fitness for the job, particularly a story by an NBC reporter, Andrew Rafferty, who wrote about the candidate’s recent coughing fit.
As Jay Caruso points out, questions about the health of presidential candidates, who are frequently in their late sixties or earlier seventies, are not unique to Clinton. Bob Dole and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. (F, 34%) received a similar treatment during their campaigns, so journalists holding Clinton to the same standard can hardly be described as sexist or in any way out of bounds.
I don’t want to seem like I’m giving Trump a pass here; anyone who has expressed a desire to strengthen libel laws clearly has no great respect for freedom of expression. But Hillary’s lack of press accessibility and hostility towards reporters who question her is especially concerning. The last thing this country needs is another president who refuses to brook criticism from the press. While the media has been unhesitating critical of Trump, most news outlets are basically in the tank for Hillary, with some even admitting as much. The fact that she is unable to tolerate a few dissenting voices from coverage that is otherwise nearly uniformly positive points to a presidency defined by secrecy, deception, and even strongman tactics to silence dissent.
Then again, Hillary doesn’t know what the word “classified” means, so maybe she will end up being transparent after all. Just not for the right reasons. (For more from the author of “Reporters Beware: A Hillary Presidency May Require a LOT of Rolling Oranges” please click HERE)
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