Former Hillary Clinton spokeswoman Jennifer Palmeri acknowledged Wednesday that the press has a liberal bias, but she claimed that actually makes journalists harder on Democrats in their coverage.
Palmieri spoke alongside former Bush administration spokesman Ari Fleischer at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., as part of a series of panels on "First Amendment challenges in the early days of the Trump administration."
"I think most journalists are probably leaning more to the left than the right," she said. "Think about the kind of person that's drawn to do this as a career. They believe in government, they think politics matters, they like it, they find it interesting, they don't make a lot of money ... But what I've found is it means they come after us harder on what I describe as the crap. They come after us harder on the palace intrigue, on the process, on things that really shouldn't matter."
In addition to her communications role for Clinton's presidential campaign against Donald Trump, Palmieri served as communications director during the Obama administration and also worked for Bill Clinton.
Moderator Mike Allen, the founder of Axios, relayed that she said backstage that the press was more likely to be tougher on Democrats in general.
"I think in general they are," she said, telling a story near the end of Bill Clinton's administration where the press was on the White House's case about rising gas prices.
"I said if President Bush were president, you guys wouldn't be coming after him on gas prices, and they were like, 'Well, no, because he's a Republican, he doesn't think that he should weigh in and fix gas prices, but you're Democrats, you're supposed to solve problems!'" she said.
She went on to say there was a "different metric" applied to Democrats by the press.
"I think they come after us harder on both being able to solve a problem, and then also on process and intrigue," she said.