Ella Dawson expected to find a Netflix bill in her Brooklyn mailbox. She discovered instead a letter from Hillary Clinton. The 24-year-old blogger, who writes often about living with genital herpes, figured it was a standard campaign mailer. She once donated $50 to Clinton.

She tore open the envelope. She froze. Did the Democratic presidential candidate, one of the most famous figures on the planet, just thank her for talking about sexually transmitted infections on the Internet?

“I am so grateful to you for not only speaking out against the stigma,” Clinton wrote, “but for also taking a courageous stand against the ridiculous, but very real, barrage of hate you received online.”

There is a very stupid controversy happening right now, about whether Hillary gave a press conference on her aero-plane, or whether it was a press gaggle, and did Asshole Hillary even give the traveling press the correct flavor of ice cream sandwiches afterward? She did not. Has it been 275 days since Hillary gave a press conference, or has it just been a day and a half? This is an IMPORTANT QUESTION.

“When she wins by a landslide, I could gather together the Dixie Chicks, Billy Corgan and everybody who’s ever sung a version of ‘Landslide,'” she said. “It’s not uptempo, but it certainly would get the message across.”

The rocker has expressed her support for Clinton’s candidacy in the past. “She’s so damn smart,” Nicks told MacLean’s last year. “As far as the Republicans go — and my parents were both Republicans — there is no rising star. If you think of the great Republican presidents, there is no that guy. There is no John Kennedy rising in the Republican world. There is no Ronald Reagan. In the Democratic world, there is no that guy either. There is Hillary. Period.”

A lot of the media coverage of Hillary Clinton reeks of sexism.


Journalists, like everyone, assume certain things are true. One of those things is that journalists serve democracy by questioning presidential candidates and holding them to account. This is a good assumption in theory.

In practice, not so much.

Prior to Labor Day, Hillary Clinton had not held a press conference in months. Withholding access was no doubt a source of great annoyance among reporters. That gets you little sympathy, though. On Twitter, reporters sought sympathy by appealing to a higher principle. We do it for you, dear voter, said NBC's Katy Tur.

If that were true, reporting on Clinton's first press conference in 275 days should have revealed things that voters care about, such as her thoughts on the Syrian civil war, collective bargaining rights, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and a host of other important issues.

Instead, we got reporting about what journalists thought was news: that Clinton held a press conference. To be sure, as NPR's Tamara Keith noted, Donald Trump has counted the days since her last press conference. But that's a convenient rationale for weeks of bellyaching by the press.