Michael Wolff

USA TODAY

What happens when the media are left only with Hillary Clinton?

By some estimates, Donald Trump has received the advertising equivalent of more than $4 billion in free media coverage, while Clinton has gotten little more than half that. Since the conventions, as his daily obnoxiousness and varied offenses against good politics continue, let me spitball that he gets 90% of the coverage to her 10%.

It is the first time in a presidential election that it’s good to be a non-entity. She doesn’t even have to make her own case. It isn’t even really a contest between him and her, it’s between him and the media, on their own volition, arguing against him. Clinton is little more than an observer to the Trump train wreck and the media’s hypnotic coverage of it.

Wolff: Derailing the Trump train

As a woman who has been hounded and excoriated by the media through her long career, she must be grateful for the reprieve. At the same time, it’s hard to believe she doesn’t find it a tad eerie. Nobody even notices the most hated woman in America. What’s with that?

We may be seeing the inadvertent reinvention of Hillary Clinton. Trump's charges against her — really not greater or meaner than those she has faced for the past 25 years — have the effect of making her look, at least in the new media perspective, rather saintly. Trump’s put her in the vaunted category of all the others he’s attacked — no matter that he’s actually supposed to be attacking her.

Whatever offenses she might have committed, or whatever questions might arise about her — those very fishy goings-on at the Clinton Foundation, for instance, generate hardly a flutter of interest — can’t reasonably compete with the hour-by-hour dramas, transgressions and palace intrigue of the Trump campaign.

The Republican Party, which ought to be the echo chamber of its candidate’s criticisms of her, indeed an ad hoc anti-Clinton media organization, is notably silent. To criticize her is to encourage him — the last thing most of the Republican Party seems to want.

The addition to the Trump campaign of right-wing attack pros and Clinton antagonists Stephen Bannon from Breitbart, and Roger Ailes, late of Fox News, might create a further sense that all criticism of her is mere Trump bile and excess.

Rieder: Media basher Trump turns to media for help

This works to Clinton's natural inclination; she doesn’t have to explain or defend, and indeed, she has gone the better part of a year — a campaign year, at that — without a news conference.

The result, by all appearances and polling calculations, seems to be that Clinton will walk into the White House having faced the least amount of scrutiny, criticism and antipathy of any major-party nominee in modern media history. This is the same Clinton who, after 25 years in public life, might reasonably have had a lot to answer for.

Once Trump is dispatched, how does the media, suddenly realizing they did her work, regard her?

Rieder: Can Clinton become transparent?

It is likely to be an odd honeymoon after something of a shotgun wedding when the media wake up and say, "Hey, wait a minute." Of course, it is dangerous to assume there is a collective mind of the media, but on the other hand, it's as dangerous to assume there isn’t.

It’s possible that in the day-after view, the media take a generous view of Clinton, seeing her as the media-consensus president, and are deeply grateful she isn’t the alternative. In this perhaps, what’s past will be regarded as past, and the Clinton record will begin on Day One of her presidency. This generous view probably needs Clinton to acknowledge her debt to the media in the form of all the emoluments — access, openness and slavish special consideration — that the media expect.

The problem here is something the media seem to have forgotten amid Trump's attack paroxysms on the press: Clinton hates the media even more than he does. Trump is at least love-hate. She is hate-hate. It is unlikely that she has forgotten how much the media hate her, too. In this chronic dysfunctional relationship, one of the most famous in modern political history, she is coldly ungiving, and the media are bitterly demanding.

Add to this that the media have changed. There’s a theory that how a candidate and president is covered changes every four years, given media innovations and the various competitive pressures of the business. The change in this campaign cycle has been entirely directed at Trump. Initially, the media indulged Trump in some ratings-driven and amoral carnival sense. Now, appalled by their own creation, the media have become, with quite some religious fervor, the defender of truth, justice, morality and proper public behavior, all focused on his undoing.

The progress toward fact-based media in the 20th century has almost wholly reverted to the personal feelings and opinions and righteousness of media in the 19th century.

The media seek to claim as much power as they can. In creating Trump and destroying him, they have found a new certainty and authority.

This enhanced power and uninhibited sense of outrage and virtue are sure to elect Clinton, then, of course, viciously turn on her.