On Monday, RNC Chair roused himself from their Prime Directive of finding more old white people to vote for his candidates to threaten CNN and NBC with “No Debates For You!” if they go forward with projects for a documentary and for a miniseries about Hillary Clinton’s life. Both are planned for release around the 2014 timeframe. But the RNC is so scared of Hillary that they will threaten to not participate in 2016 Presidential debates on these networks:
Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, on Monday sent blistering letters to the network bosses, calling their decision to air Clinton projects just as the 2016 White House campaign is heating up “disturbing and disappointing.” And if the shows go forward, the GOP will cut CNN and NBC out of Republican debates during primary season leading up to the election.
“Out of a sense of fairness and decency and in the interest of the political process and your company’s reputation, I call on you to cancel this political ad masquerading as an unbiased production,” Priebus wrote NBC Entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt. (You can read the letters in their entirety here.)
This is especially choice in light of Citizens United v. Federal Communications Commission. Remember that? Citizens United had this movie called Hillary: The Movie that they created for airing in order to show how the then frontrunner would be a bad president. Citizens United took the FCC to court to defend their free speech rights — even though this was clearly electioneering on their part. Now that CNN and NBC want to create entertainment programming, the RNC is looking to restrict the free speech rights of these networks. And they are doing it by threatening to withhold the speech of their Presidential candidates to do that. Anyone remember the last round of GOP debates? Would anyone miss them?
The RNC also released separate letters (see below) penned by Priebus to Jeff Zucker, president of CNN Worldwide, and NBC chair Robert Greenblatt, in which he accused the networks of giving “special treatment” to Clinton ahead of her possible presidential bid in 2016. The RNC chair noted that by focusing their programming on Clinton, CNN and NBC are being “unfair” to other potential Democratic candidates, such as Vice President Joe Biden and Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, and to the Republican candidates.
“Secretary Clinton has been in the public eye for well over two decades, so you certainly cannot claim that a documentary about her political career is any sort of public service or eye-opening journalism on an unknown individual,” Priebus wrote. “Quite the opposite is true: it would be most accurately described as an in-kind donation.”
Anyone remember when NEWS Corp gave $1M to the Republican Governor’s Association? Don’t even get me started on the 24/7 in-kind donation to the GOP that has earned Fox News the reputation as being the PR arm of the RNC.
In other words, we’re looking at more silly whining from the GOP. I have no idea what use either of these projects will be to Hillary Clinton, it is amazing to me that the people who are actively working at undermining the entire business of reporting and campaign speech and who have made the business of working the refs an artform (don’t get me started on how the refs are way to vulnerable to this, either) are whinging about this now. But then, if there is anything that the modern GOP is singularly good at — it is being a victim.
And how about this bit of business that was sent out by the Hillary Project — an anti-Clinton SuperPAC raising money to Stop Hillary. This isn’t new, but it is being heavily pushed to reporters and others on Twitter this week, asking folks “Have you slapped Hillary today?” Apparently one more plank in the GOP outreach to women, because encouraging violence to women is really appealing to your potential GOP voter.