The real double standard
If the mainstream media are to be believed, Hillary Clinton is attacked more unfairly than any presidential candidate in history, and these attacks stem from a sexist bias against her as the first female presidential nominee.
The latest example: After Wednesday’s NBC News Commander-In-Chief forum, writers for New York magazine, the New York Times, and Fortune, among others, lamented Matt Lauer’s questioning of Clinton over her private e-mail server and his failure to press Donald Trump on his support of the Iraq War. Suddenly, liberals have decided that Lauer is a sham journalist whose moderation of the event is just one further indication of deep-seated media bias against Clinton.
Regardless of whether or not critiques of Lauer’s performance are well-founded, it is amusing to watch the liberal press have a fit over the alleged unfair treatment of Hillary owing to her sex, because the unfair treatment goes in precisely the reverse direction.
Clinton’s press conference yesterday — her first in 278 days — consisted of only six questions, none of which demanded serious answers on serious subjects. Among the most noteworthy were two about media bias, one asking, “Do you think you’re treated differently because you’re a woman?” and the other wondering whether Clinton believes the media are going too easy on Trump. Clinton, of course, replied that she finds the double standard favoring Trump “frustrating,” but she was “heartened by the number of articles recently pointing out the quite disparate treatment of Trump and his campaign compared to ours.” This is reminiscent of Clinton’s first press conference on her e-mail scandal, in March of last year, when the first question she received was, “If you were a man today, would all this fuss being made be made?”
When, this past weekend, Clinton finally permitted the press corps to travel with her on her campaign airplane — something that has, until this election, been a common practice for presidential candidates — the initial set of questions were such softballs that one could easily mistake them for parody. Among them: What do you think of your plane? Is it great to have us with you? Have you missed us? How was your Labor Day weekend? These are media that are allegedly sexist and biased against her. Later, when Clinton deigned to entertain a handful of substantive questions from the traveling press corps, no one pressed her to clarify her recalcitrant answers on her understanding of e-mail classification or the future role of her daughter, Chelsea, in the Clinton Foundation.
This sort of fawning interaction with the press has been rare only because all of Clinton’s media interactions have been rare over the course of her presidential campaign. Her long silence, however, hasn’t prevented a variety of liberal pundits and “objective” journalists from rushing to her aid whenever questions arise about her ability to be a successful president.
For example, before Wednesday’s forum, MSNBC host and NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell asserted that discussion of Clinton’s “commander-in-chief bona fides” is “no longer on the table” because she has already proven her toughness. On Tuesday, Slate columnist Michelle Goldberg complained on MSNBC that media coverage of Clinton’s scandals focuses on “a couple of things that are rehashed over and over again, and kind of picked over for any little scrap of news,” in spite of “exoneration after exoneration after exoneration.”
A piece from BillMoyers.com yesterday claimed that Clinton, like Patriots star quarterback Tom Brady, has been “condemned by the media’s kangaroo court” and “victimized by the media’s visceral hatred of her,” and that she “is never going to catch a break.” One Vox article laments the media’s “five unspoken rules for covering Hillary,” rules such as automatically believing ludicrous allegations about her and always assuming that she acts in bad faith; another compares the Clinton Foundation to Colin Powell’s, arguing that Clinton, unlike Powell, has “never been able to enjoy” the presumption of innocence.
Clinton receives kid-glove treatment from an admiring press.
U.S. News & World Report published at least three articles on anti-Clinton media bias over the past few months, claiming that she received the most negative press of any candidate this election cycle, that the personal vitriol against her “carries broader ramifications for women in politics,” and that the media coverage of her “reeks of sexism” (supposedly evidenced, in part, by the “obsession” with her coughing fits).
A writer for The Atlantic surmises that opposition to Clinton stems from “misogyny” and the “fear of a female president,” because, other than her gender, she “is a highly conventional presidential candidate.” And New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote on Monday that, while Trump is “being graded on a curve,” the media assume that Clinton “must be corrupt” — an attitude “illustrated by the increasingly bizarre coverage of the Clinton Foundation.”
Despite numerous examples of Clinton’s receiving kid-glove treatment from an admiring press, these same journalists continue to spill ink in lamentation of the supposed sexist bias against her. According to a Salon story this week, Americans believe Clinton is a liar “because of the right and the media, not because of her.” The media? You are the media, Salon.