The New York Times reporter Amy Chozick knows that some of the liberal intelligentsia hold her partially responsible for the election of Donald Trump. The American right might still see the Times as a leftist paper, but pro-Hillary liberals believe it was unabashedly unfair to their candidate. It held her to impossible standards while making excuses for her crass, improbable opponent; it was infatuated with Clinton’s secret email server and the Russian email hack of the Democratic National Committee. In her new book, Chozick, who covered Clinton’s presidential campaigns for the Wall Street Journal in 2008, and then for the Times in 2016, wants us to know that she feels guilty about her role in Hillary’s failure to become the “FWP”, or First Woman President. Or, rather, that she ended up feeling guilty about Clinton’s loss – once the horrifying alternative became a reality.

In the riveting first half that spans Clinton’s race against Bernie Sanders, however, Chozick seems to be building a case for why Clinton should never have run. This book is in part a memoir and Chozick’s first‑person voice is funny and readable in mostly all the right ways. But by the end of Chasing Hillary, her aggressive reporting during the primaries is so at odds with her emotional mea culpa during the general election, that it’s difficult to decipher from this book what really happened with Clinton in 2016.

In several autobiographical flashbacks, Chozick documents her early affection for the candidate. When she was young, Clinton came to speak in the author’s Texas hometown and her mother’s friend dragged her along to watch. Chozick liked her: “That was it. My first astute political assessment of Hillary Clinton. She seemed nice.” It wasn’t only Hillary; Chozick liked Bill, too. Even when he drones on about the wonder of soybeans in South Africa and changes outfits so many times he reminds her colleagues of “Lady Gaga”, she insists on her admiration for him. There is more: Chozick’s husband, an Irishman, is a fan of Hillary as well – she helped bring peace to Ireland, he says, “I don’t care if she’s funny on Saturday Night Live.”

So, the book seems to imply, in order for Clinton to have turned off Chozick the Clinton-lover, the candidate must have made some pretty terrible mistakes. Indeed, as books such as Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s Shattered confirm, the first months of the Clinton campaign are a disaster. In Chozick’s telling, the “Guys”, or the people who run it, are sexist, petty and, often, pretty foolish. They complain to the New York Times even about seemingly positive stories concerning “Bill building a charitable legacy in Africa” and establishing ties with black voters: “Black people never left the Clintons,” the Guys say.

They hate the reporters covering their candidate, and journalists in general; when the political reporter Michael Hastings dies in a car accident, one of the Guys says: “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.” And the Guys especially hate Chozick, mostly because she suggested their candidate was struggling against Sanders. “No one takes you seriously,” one says to her face.

Yet Chozick is as blistering about journalism as she is about Clinton’s staff. The journalists, she recounts, must scramble for glimpses of “Hillary carrying her own tray”; they document her consumption of chicken wings. “We’ve never seen her get a burrito before,” Chozick recalls political analyst Mark Halperin observing. Chozick, in fact, wants to make the candidate happy. “I still wanted, more than anything, for Hillary to see me as a fair reporter.”

But Clinton, too, treats the reporters travelling with her contemptuously. Even off-the-record drinks, usually designed to show a candidate’s funny and candid side, fail to elicit any affection between Clinton and the journalists. Hillary trusts no one. She is haunted by her 2008 campaign, not only because of how she was treated by the press, but because she emerged from it over $10m in debt. The campaign doesn’t want to spend money on a bus for the reporters – who instead have to chase after Clinton in rental cars. Party volunteers and organisers bought their own clipboards and pens in Ohio and Florida, their own chairs, lawn signs, bumper stickers. “Once again,” Chozick writes, “Hillary’s biggest missteps of 2016 stemmed from trying to prove she’d learned from mistakes made in 2008.” Cheapness was part of the reason why the campaign didn’t send on‑the-ground resources to Michigan and Wisconsin, which she would lose to Trump.

Campaign reporters were contending with a candidate who didn’t feel she had to convince them of her ardour for public office, and who apparently had little ability to articulate why she was running. “Her only clear vision of the presidency seemed to be herself in it,” Chozick writes. Clinton calls the voters “Everyday Americans” but hates the term. She didn’t understand how much the country had changed; she “seemed like Rip van Winkle, awoken after a seven year slumber to find a vastly different country”. She missed Occupy, the Tea Party, the opioid crisis, the fact that many people felt they could call themselves middle class – “a data point that seemed a fundamental shift in the American psyche and as clear a sign as any that there was something stirring this election year”. The book portrays Clinton as stuck in the 1990s, consumed by old resentments.

By the time the Russians hack the Democratic National Committee server and WikiLeaks releases campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails, Clinton’s reporters have been drained of much of their goodwill. Chozick still feels bad about writing so many stories about the hack, as well as about Clinton’s private email server. Yet one of her excuses for the Times’s focus on the emails was that the Clinton campaign had for so long starved journalists, and perhaps especially Chozick, of information and colour. During the same period, Chozick had 57 interview requests turned down, “including those to discuss Hillary’s economic proposals, immigration , her work at the Children’s Defense Fund and her years as a working mother in Arkansas. My Times colleagues asked for interviews about women’s issues, foreign policy and national security, among many other substantive topics. Any of those stories would have likely kicked emails off the front page, even if only briefly.”

Throughout Chasing Hillary I kept thinking about a 2010 Ken Auletta story in the New Yorker about President Obama’s struggles to deal with the new horror of online media. Auletta quotes the New York Times’s Peter Baker saying that a reporter covering his beat 10 years ago had “the luxury of writing for the next day’s newspaper. He had at least a few hours to call people, to access information, to provide context. Today, as much as you want to do that, by the time your deadline comes around you’ve already filed for the web – often more than once.”

Isn’t that in part why Chozick found herself struggling to figure out how many chicken wings Clinton ate? Could New York Times reporters resist chasing stories about hacked emails that had been dumped in their laps? Yes, our current political-media arrangement at times seems to be conspiring to destroy the country. When a candidate is so terrified of the press that she refuses to say anything of substance to them, then clearly we all suffer. But somehow the person I blame for this is not Chozick.

Did reporters and voters fixate on the damaging stories because they were misogynists? Was Clinton a centrist hawk who threatened to obliterate Iran and cheered about the killing of Gaddafi and who was for most of her life associated with her husband’s Wall Street activities? Was her 2016 campaign platform actually pretty progressive? Did Trump win and Hillary lose because the US is a deeply racist country still up in arms about Barack Obama? Chasing Hillary is light on many of these issues. The book is not about them. It concerns the relationship between a candidate and her campaign reporters, between politics and media in the US. And the portrait Chozick paints is a depressing one.

• Suzy Hansen’s Notes on a Foreign Country is published by Corsair. To buy Chasing Hillary for £17 go to guardianbookshop.com. Chasing Hillary by Amy Chozick (Harper Collins, £20). To order a copy for £17, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.