Hillary Clinton’s Habit Of Avoiding Press Conferences Sending Mixed Signals To Journalists

Hillary Clinton’s habit of avoiding press conferences has been sending mixed signals to some journalists.

Having found it hard to grill her during impromptu interviews, some of these journalists are frustrated, saying that avoiding press conferences invites bad impressions. Others think otherwise, believing that she’s simply adapting a “savvy campaign tactic” that would have otherwise ensnared her, as did Donald Trump, many times over, to his own detriment.

While they are obviously not the first to notice Clinton’s tactic of avoiding press conferences, Trump himself and his team were the first to make an issue out of it.

“So, it’s been 235 days since crooked Hillary Clinton has had a press conference,” the GOP presidential nominee was caught saying to a group of reporters and supporters in Miami on July 27, as quoted by David Folkenflik of NPR. “You, as reporters who give her all of these glowing reports, should ask yourselves why.”

Whether the reporters got it, or simply ignored it, could be seen by the fact that none of them, or any others not present that day in Miami, ever bothered to require Hillary to hold any press conferences.

On August 6, seven days after Trump made an issue of Clinton’s habit of avoiding press conferences, the Democratic presidential hopeful was seen in a joint session organized by National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists in Washington, D.C., ready to answer questions, Eliza Collins of USA Today reported.

Calling the event a “halfway press conference,” Collins noted that Trump was also invited, but opted not to show up.

For some journalists, however, it didn’t deserve to be called a press conference, as the following tweets indicate.

Clinton introducer at #NABJNAHJ16 calls her Q-and-A a large press conference. It's not a press conference.

— Jennifer Epstein (@jeneps) August 5, 2016

But the question raised by Clinton’s custom of avoiding conferences remained somewhat unanswered, perhaps until late last week when a handful of columnists and journalists broke their silence in an attempt to give their answers.

James Warren, a chief media writer at Poynter.org, noting that press conferences “aren’t much liked by a media-wary Clinton,” perhaps “due in part to the Clintons’ nearly genetic predisposition to believing they’ve often been screwed, dating back to their Arkansas days,” managed to get the nod of some journalists to have their say on the matter.

The first to share his opinion to Warren regarding Clinton avoiding press conferences was Rick Lowry, editor of the National Review, who pointed out the Democratic nominee’s inclination to lean “on the back of the organizational strength of her campaign and the weakness of Trump.”

“She can’t avoid the press entirely but is limiting access as much as possible and trying not to create any high-stakes events,” Lowry said. “Given that she has a tin ear politically, why create more opportunities for a slip-up than are necessary?”

Roland Martin, host and managing editor of NewsOneNow, thinks otherwise. He believes that if there is one thing Clinton needs in her bid to become America’s next president, it should be “more press availability,” which does not have to mean attending press conferences per se, but “far more interviews with national outlets.”

“Clearly the networks have said phoning in is OK, so she should be doing 10-minute pops,” Martin said, as if giving Clinton his unsolicited advice. “Politically, this is smarter than holding freewheeling news conferences.”

Ron Fournier of the National Journal offers something that goes beyond “merely a question of news conferences versus interviews,” pointing rather to “the broader, modern-era demand for accessibility, authenticity, transparency and accountability.”

Fournier, who detected some defects in Clinton and her campaign team, who have been “stuck in the opaque, pre-internet ’90s, which doesn’t bode well for her presidency,” has, in effect, advised them to consider readjusting their campaign strategy accordingly to further boost her chance to make it to the White House.

For his part, USA Today‘s commentary editor Jill Lawrence said that press conferences have a lot of downsides for Clinton.

“She’s not good at them, she’d be asked about one controversy after another, and it would be political malpractice to distract from Trump’s unraveling,” Lawrence said, as quoted by Warren.

That does not follow, though, that Clinton’s avoidance of press conferences is the way to go.

“She needs to demonstrate she can get through a press conference with poise and without self-inflicted damage,” Lawrence insisted. “The longer she waits, the harder it gets.”

Most straightforward of them all was MSNBC analyst and longtime columnist Mike Barnicle. Recalling his reputation as “the first political journalist to invoke the legacy of the most hallowed college basketball coach, UCLA’s late John Wooden,” as Warren put it, Barnicle said the following.

“John Wooden is her campaign manager. It’s 1966 and there is no shot clock, so she’s going to just run it out. Why would she expose herself to us when she is aware, totally aware, that she is incapable of speaking in a straight line about CGI (Clinton Global Initiative) or the home server? Plus she’s paranoid.”

Revisiting Clinton’s interviews since the start of 2016, Folkenflik took a closer look at carefully sifted and analyzed data, through which he found the Democratic nominee taking “a strategy of reaching out to unconventional media outlets [that] is no longer unconventional for politicians,” a practice modeled by no other than President Barack Obama himself, and so by the Bushes, and Hillary’s husband, Bill.

Clinton’s habit of avoiding press conferences is therefore not unique to her, except maybe for Trump, who, according to Vox‘s Matthew Yglesias, “hates bad press but… loves the media.”

As Yglesias had it, “Clinton hates political reporting in the way that normal Americans hate it.”

And that must have been so because “all politicians get adversarial questions from the media, so it can be hard to underscore how genuine the dislike between Clinton and the press is.”

[Photo by John Locher/AP Images]