reflectivepundit

Hillary Clinton’s Cleavage: Media Still Reflect Gender Bias

By Brigitte L. Nacos

cleav’age (noun)
the hollow visible between a woman’s breast
when a low-cut garment is worn
(Decarta Dictionary)

In the Washington Post story that triggered the controversy, Robin Givhan wrote, “There was cleavage on display Wednesday afternoon on C-SPAN2. It belonged to Sen. Hillary Clinton. She was talking on the Senate floor about the burdensome cost of higher education. She was wearing a rose-colored blazer over a black top. The neckline sat low on her chest and had a subtle V-shape. The cleavage registered after only a quick glance. No scrunch-faced scrutiny was necessary. There wasn't an unseemly amount of cleavage showing, but there it was. Undeniable.” Today, the Post's ombudsperson defends the cleavage article (For much cruder gender bias in cable talk shows, see a recent Project for Excellence in Journalism" study).
Sean Aday and James Devitt opened their study “Style Over Substance” on newspaper coverage of female candidates and in particularly Elizabeth Dole’s short effort to win the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, with quotations from a newspaper column that was published in the Denver Post shortly after Geraldina Ferraro’s nomination as the first female vice-presidential candidate of a major party. These are some of the points that columnist Woodrow Paige made at the time:

Ferraro has nicer legs than any previous vice-presidential candidate.
She’s a blonde. So the most looming question will be, ‘Does she or doesn’t she?'
Will she be the first vice president to enter a wet T-shirt contest?”

Based on their case study, Aday and Devitt concluded in 2000 that there was still gender bias in the media. In particular, they found that females received less issue coverage than their male counterparts but more personal coverage which included their appearance and attire. Judging from the media’s recent coverage of Hillary Clintons cleavage, this sort of gender bias is alive and well—although some reporters and editors have become aware enough of this traditional gender bias in the media that they write occasionally about the appearance of male politicians and candidates as well, typically about their hair cuts and styles.

The Ironic Duel of Two Democratic Frontrunners: Hillary Clinton versus Barack Obama

By Brigitte L. Nacos
More than one year before the presidential elections and nearly six months before the first caucuses and primaries Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are, according to polls, nation-wide frontrunners for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination with John Edwards in third place and in the best position to surge, if one or both of the frontrunners stumble. Moreover, Edwards polls well in Iowaand may pass both Clinton and Obama without major mistakes on their part. But at this point, there is a very real prospect of either a white woman or a black man becoming the presidential candidate of one of the major political parties for the first time. Moreover, given the record low public approval ratings for the president and Republicans in Congress, Senator Clinton and Senator Obama are in excellent positions to become the country’s first female or first black president. It is ironic that these two candidates have escalated a disagreement that started during the recent CNN/YOUTUBE debate into an unnecessarily bitter rhetorical bout. The last thing these candidates need is a mutually destructive war of words. 

Another of President Bush’s al-Qaeda Speeches

By Brigitte L. Nacos
“Nearly six years after the 9/11 attacks, America remains a nation at war. The terrorist network that attacked us that day is determined to strike our country again, and we must do everything in our power to stop them.”

“The key theater in this global war is Iraq. Our troops are serving bravely in that country. They're opposing ruthless enemies, and no enemy is more ruthless in Iraq than al Qaeda.”

The above are excerpts from remarks that George W. Bush made Tuesday at Charleston Air Force Base. After listening to sound bites of his address earlier, I just read the full transcript of what is best characterized another of the president’s al-Qaeda speeches. By my count, in his 3505-word and less than 30-minute speech, the President mentioned al-Qaeda 91 times, Osama bin Laden 23 times, and Ayman al-Zawahiri and other al-Qaeda and alleged al-Qaeda leaders 18 times. With Mr. Bush’s public disapproval rating at a record high (65% in the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll) and his approval at a record low (33%), his 9/11-Iraq-al-Qaeda narrative seems to have lost its luster: 68% of the public disapproves the President’s handling of the Iraq situation. The speech in South Carolina was another effort to reenlist public support for continuing the “war on terrorism” in Iraq by painting al-Qaeda Central as a superpower presiding over a global network of satellite al-Qaeda cells and nodes with the most dangerous operating in Iraq. In the president’s words,

“Al Qaida in Iraq is a group founded by foreign terrorists, led largely by foreign terrorists, and loyal to a foreign terrorist leader -- Osama bin Laden. They know they're al Qaida. The Iraqi people know they are al Qaida. People across the Muslim world know they are al Qaida. And there's a good reason they are called al Qaida in Iraq: They are al Qaida ... in ...Iraq…They are a full member of the al Qaida terrorist network. The al Qaida leadership provides strategic guidance to their Iraqi operatives...”

After the Iraq Debacle: Next Stop Iran?

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Although William Kristol explained in Sunday’s Washington Post, “why Bush will be a winner” and after all a successful President, even most Kristol-like conservative ideologues draw different conclusions. Whatever “political capital” George W. Bush accumulated, when he was reelected in 2004, is not just spent by now, but overspent.However hard the White House tries to repackage the non-existent links between Iraq, 9-11, and al-Qaeda Central, the already weak support for the post-invasion failure in Iraq is waning by the hour. Never mind Kristol’s ridiculous assessment that in Iraq “we now seem to be on course to a successful outcome.” The question is, of course, what a "successful outcome" means for those who, like Kristol, pushed for the Iraq war in the first place. Frank Rich may well be right, when he suggests that the White House creates “a new fictional story line to keep the war going until President Bush can dump it on his successor.” But according to an alarming story in today’s Guardian, Vice-President Cheney doesn’t want to go quiet and is not satisfied with dumping just the Iraq mess on the next president. Instead, he wants to make Iran the next stop for military intervention according to the Guardian. As the British newspaper puts it, “The balance in the internal White House debate over Iran has shifted back in favour of military action before President Bush leaves office in 18 months…”

Reported Strengthening of al-Qaeda after Six-Year War on Terrorism

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Newsweek/MSNBC and the Washington Post report on a new U.S.intelligence estimate titled "Al-Qaida Better Positioned to Strike the West" that concludes, “the terrorist network is gaining strength and has established a safe haven in remote tribal areas of western Pakistan for training and planning attacks.” According to CIA deputy director John A. Kringen, "We see more training. We see more money. We see more communications.” The other day, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff told the Chicago Tribune that “he had a ‘gut feeling’ that the country was entering a new period of increased risk this summer.” Nobody can deny that sooner or later there will be terrorist strikes or at least attempts inside
U.S. borders by actual members of the central al-Qaeda organization or inspired groups, cells, or individuals. But it is disconcerting to learn that the intelligence community is sure of more training, more money, and more communications on the part of al-Qaeda without seeing also, finally, where and how to go after the real 9/11 culprits. Neither the military efforts in Afghanistan nor the Iraq war and occupation prevented al-Qaeda from regrouping. It doesn’t really matter whether the core organization is again involved in providing terrorist know-how and money to foot-soldiers or whether al-Qaeda Central is inspiring autonomous cliques of extremists around the world and recruits them into the terrorist cause. Maybe both. But it is the growth of recruits without actual links to al-Qaeda that is more troubling because these amateur terrorists are harder to spot and harder to stop than professional terrorists.

What Extreme “Experts” Want You to Believe About the Roots of Terrorism

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Want to know how out of bounce so-called American “terrorism experts” are with their explanations of the roots and causes of the very terrorism we are facing today? Take a look at Paul Krugman’s column in today’s New York Times and you’ll learn about the self-serving counter-propaganda that permeates both the extreme political strata and its like-minded media servants that make great efforts to convince their audiences that they stand for reality and truth and patriotism and American values. These are in my view the most important  sentences in Krugman’s opinion piece:

“These days terrorism is the first refuge of scoundrels. So when British authorities announced that a ring of Muslim doctors working for the National Health Service was behind the recent failed bomb plot, we should have known what was coming.

National healthcare: Breeding ground for terror?” read the on-screen headline, as the Fox News host Neil Cavuto and the commentator Jerry Bowyer solemnly discussed how universal health care promotes terrorism.

While this was crass even by the standards of Bush-era political discourse, Fox was following in a long tradition. For more than 60 years, the medical-industrial complex and its political allies have used scare tactics to prevent America from following its conscience and making access to health care a right for all its citizens.

I say conscience, because the health care issue is, most of all, about morality.

That’s what we learn from the overwhelming response to Michael Moore’s “Sicko.” Health care reformers should, by all means, address the anxieties of middle-class Americans, their growing and justified fear of finding themselves uninsured or having their insurers deny coverage when they need it most. But reformers shouldn’t focus only on self-interest. They should also appeal to Americans’ sense of decency and humanity.”

Ah, well--do not hold your breath. I recall recent conversation with entirely nice, well-to-do physicians and successful people in other fields about what I believe is the need for fundamental reforms that make for mandatory universal health care. But the opposition always counters with scare tactics charging that  this will come down to "socialized medicine" a la Western Europe.

Medical Doctors’ Terror Cells and the Virtual Nature of Today’s Terrorism

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Writing about the global epidemic of suicide terrorism by Muslim extremists and the latest events in London and at Glasgow airport, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote, “In the old days, you needed a terror infrastructure with bases in Beirut or Afghanistan to lash out in a big way. Not anymore. Now all you need is the virtual Afghanistan— the Internet and a few cellphones — to recruit, indoctrinate, plan and execute. Hence, the atomization — little terror groups sprouting everywhere. Everyone now has a starter kit.” Indeed, al-Qaeda is the perfect example: Less than ten years ago, the organization was centrally guided and controlled by Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and a few other men. Recruiting was the result of personal contacts, training was provided in actual training facilities, terror attacks were conceived and plots directed by operatives who were part of or worked closely with the leadership, cells were established at the request of the central directorate. The terrorist cell of physicians and other medical workers in the United Kingdom behind the latest terrorism attempts in London and Glasgow is just the latest affirmation of contemporary terrorism’s increasingly virtual nature. As the Washington Post reports today, one of the central figures in the plots, Dr. Bilal Abdulla, had been warned by his colleagues at the Royal Alexandra Hospital “that he was spending too much time perusing Arabic-language Web sites instead of tending to his duties.” Moreover, there are reports about links between the U.K.cell of physicians and medical doctors in Australia. According to latest reports,“Police have seized computers and other material from two hospitals in Australia as part of the investigation into attempted car bombings in London and Glasgow. Detectives also revealed that inquiries in Australia, where Indian doctor Mohammed Haneef was arrested in Queensland state on Monday, had also widened to a third state, New South Wales.” The Australian authorities’ focus on computers indicates that today’s counterterrorism efforts concentrates increasingly on computers, e-mail records, and the Internet.

Al-Qaeda is Not the New Superpower: Terrorists Win When We Allow Them to Win

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Judging from the news (especially on the all news cable networks) of the failed attempt to drive a burning jeep into the terminal building of Glasgow airport and what was reported as foiled plots to explode two cars in the midst of London, al-Qaeda is the world’s new superpower. Public officials in the United Kingdom contributed to this perception. As Mary Jordan and Craig Whitlock report in the Washington Post, Britain’s new Prime Minister Gordon Brown told his nation that it is “clear that we are dealing, in general terms, with people who are associated with al-Qaeda." He warned furthermore, "It's obvious that we have a group of people -- not just in this country, but around the world -- who're prepared at any time to inflict what they want to be maximum damage on civilians, irrespective of the religion of these people who are killed or maimed.” According to an Associated Press report, Brown’s terrorism advisor, Lord Stevens, added that “Al-Qaida has imported the tactics of Baghdad and Bali to the streets of the UK.” On his No Quarter blog, terrorism expert Larry Johnson writes, “As events unfold I'm simply asking that folks take a big deep breath and try to keep things in perspective. Are there jihadist extremists in the world who are willing to kill innocents?  Absolutely. Are they amenable to negotiation? No.  I am not in the, ‘have you hugged a terrorist today’ camp. However, we need to stop equating their hatred with actual capability.”  Instead, public officials and the media hype the terrorist threat. And presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani was the first of the contenders trying to score political points off the events in the U.K, when he said in New Orleans, “The car bomb scare in London and the attack Saturday at the Glasgow airport underscore the need for a strong immigration policy in the United States.”
    Public officials and the news media have an obligation to inform and educate the public about the calculus of terrorism so that citizens understand the scheme of political violence in which the psychological impact on target societies surpasses the number of people killed and injured. Every person that is killed in a terrorist event means a tragic, utterly unnecessary loss. But we must also keep in mind that many more people die each year because of traffic accidents, crimes, cancer, heart attacks, and AIDS rather than in terrorist incidents. About 40,000 Americans are killed year in, year out in traffic accidents alone compared to about 3,000 persons who perished on 9/11 in the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Yet, the victims of diseases and accidents do not cause the widespread fear and depression that are common in the wake of major acts of terrorism. Target societies must become aware of these facts and realize that the psychological impact of terrorism is disproportionate to the likelihood that an individual will become a victim of terror strikes.