There is a real reason why this is particularly damaging to Hillary, outside of the "everyone does it" defense being offered here.
She's got a reputation for being manipulative, controlling, and cold-calculating ... more so than the other candidates. Besides this story we had Drudge breaking a story about Wolf Blitzer being warned by the Clinton campaign to not "go Russert" on her; that is, to not ask tough questions.
Yesterday afternoon Hugh Hewitt had Jonathan Alter on his show, a VERY left Democrat reporter. Hewitt asked him a hypothetical, "Who would you rather cover, Obama or Clinton?" and Alter said Obama, partly because he's new and partly because she's hard to cover.
Then we have this from the New Republic, a leftist magazine (via Brit Hume):
Quote:
Planted questions apparently are not the only way the Hillary Clinton campaign has sought to influence media coverage. Michael Crowley writes in The New Republic magazine that the Clinton campaign uses frequent rebukes, late-night complaint phone calls and the withholding of access as tools to control reporters.
Crowley writes — "Even seasoned political journalists describe reporting on Hillary as a torturous experience... Privately, they recount excruciating battles to secure basic facts. Innocent queries are met with deep suspicion. Only surgically precise questioning yields relevant answers.
"Despite all the grumbling, however, the press has showered Hillary with strikingly positive coverage. 'It's one of the few times I've seen journalists respect someone for beating the hell out of them,' says a veteran Democratic media operative."
|
So this goes beyond an "everyone does it" ethic where Hillary just happened to get caught. It serves to reinforce an image with the public that she would like to overcome.