Smith is not a Reuters employee and any opinions expressed are his own.

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Hillary

Early this summer, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign for president learned that the men’s magazine GQ was working on a story the campaign was sure to hate: an account of infighting in Hillaryland.

So Clinton’s aides pulled a page from the book of Hollywood publicists and offered GQ a stark choice: Kill the piece, or lose access to planned celebrity coverboy Bill Clinton.

Despite internal protests, GQ editor Jim Nelson met the Clinton campaign’s demands, which had been delivered by Bill Clinton’s spokesman, Jay Carson, several sources familiar with the conversations said.

Smith notes that there is nothing new about campaigns providing more access to sympathetic reporters. The difference here, he wrote, is “what sources described as a barely veiled transaction of editorial leverage for access.” And in the case of Joshua Green, the Atlantic Monthly editor who reported the GQ story, the campaign didn’t quite consider him sympathetic based on his past stories.

The Clinton campaign did not reply to our request for comment. Green declined to comment. GQ gave us the statement that it gave Politico, attributed to editor-in-chief Jim Nelson:

I don’t really get into the inner workings of the magazine, but I can tell you yes, we did kill a Hillary piece. We kill pieces all the time for a variety of reasons. Other than that, I don’t have a lot more to add about what’s going or not going into the magazine.

A spokesman for Conde Nast, which publishes GQ, would not comment further, leaving us with one unanswered question: How does an editor-in-chief not get into the inner workings of his magazine?