Hillary Clinton's Iron Will

When I came to DC to serve in the first Clinton White House in 1993, people back home in the Midwest would sometimes ask me what I thought was the most dysfunctional thing about the legendarily dysfunctional city of Washington, DC. I would tell them it was the national press corps. There were a lot of arrogant, power hungry, self-obsessed people in this city, I would tell them, but I felt like the worst of the worst of them resided in the world of the big national media operations.

And in the media-consolidated, click-bait times we live in now, it has only gotten worse. It isn't that there aren't some individual reporters who are good people and good reporters, there definitely are. The problem is that the culture and incentive system of Big Media reinforces the tendencies toward pack journalism, media frenzies, and sensationalized stories that are much ado about nothing.

Which leads me to the Hillary health care scare. When the video of her looking shaky came out Sunday, the media got so ginned up about what is actually a pretty dull story -- a little walking pneumonia, she was up and about a couple hours later. But they turned it into the world's most hyper-stimulated process saga: why did the campaign wait so long to tell us, when did Hillary tell her own staff she was taking some antibiotics, blah blah blah.

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