Is the media Hillary Clinton's biggest enemy?

Is the media Hillary Clinton&#039;s biggest enemy?

(Image credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

last updated 8 January 2015

So ask Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush in a lengthy Politico Magazine profile of the former secretary of state and 2016 Democratic frontrunner.

If Clinton says yes [to another presidential run], she'll have access to a bottomless pool of Democratic political talent and cash to match all those hyperbolic pronouncements about her inevitability. If she doesn't run, the single biggest factor holding her back will be the media, according to an informal survey of three dozen friends, allies and former aides interviewed for this article. As much as anything else, her ambivalence about the race, they told us, reflects her distaste for and apprehension of a rapacious, shallow and sometimes outright sexist national political press corps acting as enablers for her enemies on the right. [Politico Magazine]

Clinton undoubtedly has long had a troubled relationship with the press, culminating in a stinging defeat to Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primaries that was at least partly fueled by glowing press coverage for the young senator from Illinois. But the idea that Clinton has a media problem going into 2016 might draw some scoffs from those on the right, who have seen her winning some pretty decent coverage herself.

One thing certainly has not changed: The disparate members of Hillaryland have no qualms dishing to reporters, which always ends up portraying the Clinton family as a walking psychodrama of barely controlled chaos. After the debacle of 2008, that's certainly not the message the Clintons want to send.