Reply #4: A couple of things about this... [View All]

[Atman]

Yes, apparently the Clinton campaign threatened GQ Magazine in order to kill a negative story about turmoil inside Hillary Clinton's organization. The threat was that they'd deny access to the campaign. GQ was about to feature Bill Clinton on the cover as their Man Of The Year. They'd already done the story, all the reporting was done, so some questioned "What's the big deal."

Indeed. There is no big deal, although Joe Scarborough sure wanted to make it one. Here's the thing though; this happens all the time in the magazine publishing industry. I know, I used to publish a real live newsstand magazine (a surf mag, actually), and even in the surfing industry the same games were played. We'll feature your guy on the cover if you sign a big ad contract. Some advertiser would threaten to pull his ads because of a negative story. A sponsored surfer would threaten not to allow his photos to be used if we didn't run some other photo. Whatever.

The point is, this just isn't a real story. It's just the daily business of magazine publishing, and as Joe's guest had to point out to him, GQ stands for "Gentleman's Quarterly." It's a freaking fashion and style magazine, not a political magazine. So the hell what if they lose access. Except for that maybe Clinton would also cut off access to all of Conde Naste's publications, which also include Vanity Fair, which DOES cover lots of politics. Would she really do this during an election year? Cut off a source of free publicity? Hard to say. But either way, the whole story is much ado about nothing.

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