Reporters Would Just Scream at Her About Emails -How much media is to blame for Hillarys defeat.

INTERROGATION
“Reporters Would Just Scream at Her About Emails”
A New York Times campaign reporter on how much the media is to blame for Hillary’s defeat.
By ISAAC CHOTINER


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When it comes to the issue of the emails, and the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s handling of it, you say about the Times that “there was an insatiable appetite for email-related stories. I can’t explain it exactly except to compare it to a fever that spread through every newsroom and made us all salivate over the tiniest morsels.” You say you regret and resent this, but what role do you think the Times had in how big a story it became? And do you connect the way you describe the “salivating over the tiniest morsels” to your description of Ryan and the type of political stories the Times wanted?

I don’t say that it spread through the Times. I say it spread through every—the insatiable appetite is clearly across all media. It’s not specific to the Times in the book.

You say it “spread through every newsroom and made us all salivate over the tiniest morsels.” That presumably includes the Times.


“Us,” the media, yeah, the media including the Times. I think a lot of the furor over the emails came from cable news and what was feeding cable, so I want to make clear that that section wasn’t just about the Times. Look, I understand Hillary’s supporters complaining about the veracity and volume of stories around the email server. But I think it’s hard to say that the leading candidate for the presidency of the United States being under FBI investigation is a nonstory, which seems like what some of her supporters have argued. You can debate the legitimacy of the FBI investigation, but it was definitely a big story. There is an easy sense of comparing it to the scandals on the other side, on Trump’s side, and saying, “Well, compared to what Trump has done, it’s nothing.” I think it’s a dangerous proposition to say, well, because the other guy is beyond the pale, we are going to ignore this other big story.


That said, I do write in the book that I regret and even resent that it became the only story. We would go to see these press conferences when Hillary did them—because she rarely did—and reporters would just scream at her about emails. There would be people trying to get other questions in and it just got completely drowned out. My best example of this is that I spent a year trying to talk to this woman Sarah Ehrman, who was this feminist firebrand Democrat who Hillary lived with after law school when she was working on the Watergate committee and she was moving down to Arkansas to marry Bill Clinton. And Sarah Ehrman offered to drive her down and on the three-day road trip she tried to talk her out of it. She said, “You are throwing your life away. You are the most gifted woman I have ever met. You could do anything you want to do.” So I had wanted to re-create this road trip to show readers this vulnerable, different side of Hillary, and it took me a year to convince Sarah Ehrman to speak on the record. I had to bring her babka and wine, and finally I get the story together, and it posts [online] and three hours later Comey sends his letter to Congress, so the story never even made it into the paper. It was impossible to get other sympathetic stories to break through in the environment we were in.

Link to tweet

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/04/amy-chozick-on-how-much-the-media-is-to-blame-for-hillarys-defeat.html