Daily Mail reporter David Martosko, the designated Hillary Clinton campaign print pool reporter in New Hampshire Monday who was denied access to her events, told The Kelly File Monday night that "the Clinton campaign does not get to choose who covers them."
As the Federalist explained, pool reporters will cover an event with limited press access on behalf of a group of organizations and send their report to other outlets to use as they will. It was Martosko's turn in the rotation Monday. Daily Mail is a British tabloid with a huge international audience, and Martosko has written unflattering stories about the Clinton campaign, including one about the smaller-than-reported crowd for her campaign relaunch Saturday.
Martosko was told to take a hike for conflicting reasons, and he wasn't even allowed to use a bathroom on the site of Clinton's event by her staffers. The pool leapt to Martosko's defense.
"The pool in general is a very tight-knit organization," Martosko said. "It's very loose, but it's a tight-knit group of professionals. And to a man and woman, they all said no. The Clinton campaign does not get to choose who covers them, and that's really the controversy today. This is the kind of thing we see in other countries that we don't want to emulate."
"They don't get to control that," Kelly said. "This is just one thing she doesn't get to control ... We the press get to decide very few things, but one of them is who's going to go in there and represent us."
The campaign team for Clinton, who is a former US secretary of state, is not allowing a reporter from the Daily Mail, a London news outlet, to have access to her events. Nick Merrill, a Clinton campaign spokesman, said that the campaign is getting "blowback" from foreign outlets. Foreign outlets have not been granted access to some Clinton events because the campaign wants to give preference to US publications.
"We need to rethink it all, maybe for a day," Merrill told David Martosko, a reporter for the Daily Mail, according to the reporter’s account of the conversation sent to other outlets in the national pool. "And just cool things off until we can have a discussion."
The flap is the latest flashpoint between the Clinton campaign and the political press corps.
The travel pool covering Clinton released a statement calling the campaign's actions "unacceptable."
Statement from the travel pool of journalists covering @HillaryClinton - endorsed by 13 news orgs pic.twitter.com/VRek5IL75W
— David Martosko (@dmartosko) June 15, 2015