Hillary Clinton and the Media’s Tendency to Make and Break Candidates

By Brigitte L. Nacos
After first proclaiming Hillary Clinton’s presidential nomination as foregone conclusion, the news media took her down by first blowing her less than stellar performance in one of the numerous televised campaign debates out of proportion and then following up with a constant barrage of very critical straight news coverage and commentary. In today’s Washington Post, Dan Balz writes of Senator Clinton, “She once was the all-but-inevitable front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, powered by the best brand name in her party, a rock-steady performance on the campaign trail, and a muscular, confident campaign team known for playing hard -- and winning. Many Democrats still see Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton as their likeliest nominee, but all talk of inevitability is gone.” 

What reporters and columnists fail to acknowledge is their own role in making and breaking candidates. After helping to establish front-runners, the leading media tend to take the favorites down, or at least try to do so, by overemphasizing their alleged or real negatives and, at the same time promote other candidates as more attractive options. In the case of Clinton, one wonders whether her gender has turned from initially favorable coverage (the prospect of the first female president) into a media liability. Today, for example, a lengthy report about Hillary Clinton by Mark Leibovich was teased on the New York Times web site with the sentence, “After years of public battles, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton must prove she is not too hardened to inspire.” There is a double standard here in that it is difficult to imagine such a sentence in a story about a male presidential contender. Nor are male candidates criticized as being shrill when they engage in tough rhetorical exchanges with their competitors. If you doubt that gender bias is still entrenched in today’s media, take a look at an article by Robin Givhan in today’s Washington Post that is solely devoted to Clinton’s looks. These are the amazing opening paragraphs of this amazing story:

“The mind, so easily distracted by things mauve and lemon yellow, strays from more pressing concerns to ponder the sartorial: How many pantsuits does Hillary Clinton have in her closet? And does she ever wear them in the same combination more than once?
The pantsuit is Clinton's uniform. Hers is a mix-and-match world, a grown-up land of Garanimals: black pants with gray jacket, tan jacket with black pants, tan jacket with tan pants. There are a host of reasons to explain Clinton's attachment to pantsuits. They are comfortable. They can be flattering, although not when the jacket hem aligns with the widest part of the hips hypothetically speaking, of course). Does she even have hips?
And because Clinton seems to prefer crossing her legs at the ankle—in the way girls were taught when girls were still sent to finishing school—there is less likelihood of any embarrassing straight-to-YouTube video.”

Gender bias does not explain how the media have turned on Senator Clinton but it adds to the make-and-break-candidates tendency. Moreover, the Republican race is witnessing a similar pro-underdog phenomenon: While the early leaders in the polls Matt Romney (Iowa and New Hampshire) and Rudy Giuliani (nation-wide) have fallen out favor in media circles and are on the receiving end of critical coverage and comments, Mike Huckabee has emerged as something of a darling in the liberal media. One of my favorite columnists, Frank Rich of the New York Times, writes today that in Huckabee the Republicans have found their Obama and offers the following positive assessment:

“What really may be going on here is a mirror image of the phenomenon that has upended Hillary Clinton’s “inevitability” among Democrats. Like Senator Obama, Mr. Huckabee is the youngest in his party’s field. (At 52, he’s also younger than every Democratic contender except Mr. Obama, who is 46.) Both men have a history of speaking across party and racial lines. Both men possess that rarest of commodities in American public life: wit. Most important, both men aspire (not always successfully) to avoid the hyper-partisanship of the Clinton-Bush era.”

Mr. Rich is obviously not bothered by what his colleague Gail Collins mentioned earlier this week, namely, that Huckabee told students at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University “that God orchestrated his sudden surge in the polls.”  If Huckabee were to win the Republican nomination and the White House, it seem that we would get in one respect a carbon copy of the current one. After all, this is what George W. Bush told Bob Woodward about his decision to go to war against Iraq according to a CBS News transcript:

Having given the order [to start the invasion], the president walked alone around the circle behind the White House. Months later, he told Woodward: “As I walked around the circle, I prayed that our troops be safe, be protected by the Almighty. Going into this period, I was praying for strength to do the Lord's will. I'm surely not going to justify war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case, I pray that I be as good a messenger of his will as possible. And then, of course, I pray for forgiveness."
Did Mr. Bush ask his father for any advice? “I asked the president about this. And President Bush said, ‘Well, no,’ and then he got defensive about it,” says Woodward. “Then he said something that really struck me. He said of his father, ‘He is the wrong father to appeal to for advice. The wrong father to go to, to appeal to in terms of strength.’ And then he said, ‘There's a higher Father that I appeal to.’"

Perhaps, there is no reason for concern. There is ample time for the media to make and break presidential hopefuls along the way to the party conventions and Election Day next year.

P.S. My criticism of the media's gender bias and a Washington Post article about Hillary Clinton's looks is not contradicted by today's article in the Post about Mitt Romney's looks. The latter piece by Robin Givhan is fully devoted to an alleged controversy about the candidate's "anchorman hair" and does not mention his attire, color choices, body language and the possible meaning thereof as does her piece on Clinton. About the hair issue, Givhan writes,

"The most memorable accomplishment of the TV ad depicting Mitt Romney jogging along a tree-lined road -- huffing and schvitzing as he goes -- is assuring voters that his hair is not actually carved out of granite.

The ad, which owes no small debt for inspiration to the Nike marketing oeuvre, demonstrates to voters -- all recent evidence to the contrary -- that Romney's well-tended, sleek hair does in fact move. Thick hanks of it are plastered to his moist forehead -- an image on which the camera explicitly lingers

Romney has been accused of having anchorman hair--the kind of glossy perfection that lies neat and immobile atop the heads of men such as NBC's Brian Williams and movie lands Ron Burgundy. the comparison is not meant as a compliment."

Comments

[Albany Lawyer Warren Redlich]

While I agree with your criticism of the mainstream media, perhaps you should look in the mirror. Here you have a prominent blog (PageRank 5), you frequently discuss the presidential election, and I can't find Ron Paul mentioned anywhere on here.

Most amazing since I found your blog after a Google search for my old friend David Epstein (we were at Stanford GSB together). I saw David speaking on the PBS NOW program on Ron Paul.

By not talking about Ron Paul, you are dead-on with most of the mainstream media, doing your best not to make him as a candidate.

[Brigitte]

Mr. Redlich:
You are right that the mainstream media ignore candidates that do not have high poll numbers at the early stages of our far too long election campaigns. I have considered that as an unhealthy bias all along in that this practice does not allow voters to get the whole range of views candidates hold and deprives so-called minor candidates to become better known. I also do not agree with the media organizers of debates that exclude candidates with lower poll numbers in the early stages of election campaigns from participating--even before the first caucuses/primaries.
However, my blog is not to be compared with the mainstream media in that our posts strive for informed commentary--not for all-the-news-that's-fit-to-print straight news reporting.
I thank you for your comment and hope you will visit and comment again.

[venuchandar]

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