Clinton decries state of press

Hillary Clinton criticized the press on Tuesday, arguing it has created “hurdles for people who want to serve.”

The former secretary of State, who is widely expected to run for the White House in 2016, suggested she might think twice because of an aggressive press corps.

{mosads}She also argued reporters are less focused on reporting the news now than they were a few decades ago.

“If you look at how much time used to be spent reporting the news, the real news, not analyzing it, but reporting the news, in the 1960s and ’70s compared to now, it’s dramatically shrunk,” Clinton said during a question-and-answer session at the Dreamforce technology conference in San Francisco.

“And people are looking for the best angle, the quickest hit, the biggest embarrassment, instead of in a democracy doing what we should be doing, which is giving people information so they can be decisionmakers, since as voters, indeed they are,” she said. 

“For me, we have created very difficult hurdles for people who want to serve, who believe they can lead, to be able to do so, and the media has intensified that over time,” the former first lady said.

Clinton has had a long, fraught relationship with the media, from the Monica Lewinsky scandal during her husband’s aministration and other battles of the 1990s to the present. Clinton ally David Brock founded Media Matters, an organization dedicated to countering what it views as “conservative misinformation” in the media. 

Just last month, the Clintons received criticism for how closely they guarded press access at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York. One reporter said she was followed by a Clinton volunteer to the bathroom and that the volunteer waited outside her stall.

Clinton didn’t just criticize the press; she said the growing fundraising needs of candidates also makes running for office less desirable.

She said when she was a senator in New York, she spoke to older senators who “bemoaned” that they had to spend all their time fundraising.

“They’re on the fundraising march, and they don’t get to know their colleagues, they don’t play golf, they don’t play cards, they don’t have dinner, have their children meet each other,” Clinton said. 

In an apparent reference to the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, she added that the role of money has worsened. 

“And then with the changes from the Supreme Court, and huge amounts of unregulated money that is flooding into the elections, the hamster wheel is going so fast that it’s almost hard to imagine how anybody could keep up, let alone think about solving problems,” she said.