No longer wed to The Grey Lady, former New York Times editor Jill Abramson gave the newspaper a tongue lashing for its coverage of the Hillary Clinton email scandal. In short: “Why is that a big deal?”
Politico chief political correspondent Glenn Thrush‘s podcast interview with Abramson gave us whiplash this morning as we listened to the former editor critique her former colleagues’ professionalism in the worst of ways.
In essence: Why does this story even matter?
In his “Off Message” podcast, Thrush questions Clinton on how she views her media coverage in comparison to the big boys in the presidential race that once included GOP hopeful Carly Fiorina, who — despite having a resting angry face — had to put up with Republican frontrunner Donald Trump trashing her looks. Abramson says Clinton has to endure a “purity” test the others don’t.
But more importantly, Abramson, a former campaign consultant to Bill Clinton in Arkansas, says the email scandals add up to a whole lot of nothing. In her words: “Very little.”
She also said Clinton clearly gets “more scrutiny” than the other candidates — even by the NYT.
“Where I think Hillary Clinton faces, you know, certainly more of a burden is that the controversies she’s been in are immediately labeled, you know, ‘travelgate or ‘emailgate.’ … If you actually asked people what about any of these controversies bothers them, they don’t know anything specific about any of them.”
She continued butchering her former newspaper, saying, “The issue, to me, that’s at the crux is that everything that we know that was classified was classified after the fact, after the emails were sent. And so, why is that a big deal?”
Abramson teaches at Harvard and writes for the Guardian. She became the first female editor of the NYT in 2011, but was stripped of her job in 2014 after she lost the loyalty of newsroom newsroom employees. Dean Baquet replaced her. But the biggest burn of all — as reported by Thrush — is that her compensation package was meager in comparison to Bill Keller, the man she replaced.