The new Hillary TV show profiles media audacity and network political culture.
Reading Right is a continuing examination of the ways that corporate media sneak their political agenda into our information habits, requiring the need for closer, informed evaluation.
What difference does it make that CBS promoted its rival Apple TV+ series Gutsy? The difference is the noteworthy — in fact, undeniable — demonstration that we are in an era of highly suspicious communications, when the media conspire to robotize and standardize our thoughts.
With Gutsy, TV networks and streaming platforms join forces to broadcast a shared ideology. Beyond discrete concerns about profit (their ultimate common ground), they all promote liberal-media fave Hillary Clinton, their pantsuited embodiment of principles.
Gutsy is the television adaptation of The Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resistance, co-authored by Hillary and her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, and published in 2019. The CBS fake-news promo segment, essentially a tie-in product placement for the Clintons’ Apple TV+ commission, are not corporate contradictions. Together, they illustrate the legacy media’s continual advertisement of Hillary’s social presence — an unrelenting refusal to acknowledge her loss of the 2016 presidential election.
CBS and Apple TV+ create more than a business merger. Their mutual subject exposes media partisanship, the cross-pollination of political viewpoints — specifically the corporate feminism for which Hillary Clinton has served as motivational icon.
This was made literal when CBS tooled its prime-time drama series Madame Secretary as a fictional allegory to Clinton’s tenure from 2009 to 2013 as the secretary of state. Madame Secretary (starring Tea Leoni) ran for six seasons, from 2014 to 2019. During that period, the #MeToo movement took off (triggered by Trump’s victory over Hillary and the initial Harvey Weinstein allegations). Next, TV veteran Susan Zirinksy was appointed the first female president of CBS News (following sexual allegations against David Rhodes, brother of Ben Rhodes, the Obama White House communications adviser and speechwriter). Each parallel change corresponded with the media establishment’s obsessive desire to see “Madame President” Clinton, as on Newsweek’s infamously expectant cover-story gaffe, in which the magazine prematurely blasted out a cover photo touting her 2016 victory. Leoni’s glamorized impersonation of Hillary justifies the “She persisted” slogan that became the subject of Chelsea Clinton’s 2017 book, She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World. In 2018, Hillary herself made a cameo appearance in Madame Secretary.
CBS corporate culture passes recalcitrant feminism on to unsuspecting viewers, encouraging them to overlook Hillary’s failings. Now, Gutsy continues pushing the lockstep politics that are detrimental to the honest functioning of journalism. (It’s why CBS is often tagged Constant B.S.) CBS aired an Apple+ clip: “We’re hitting the road to shine a light on women who inspire us to be bolder and braver.” Gutsy’s road trip premise adds Thelma & Louise impertinence to CBS “On the Road with Charles Kuralt” folksiness. The show goes over a cliff as privileged Hillary and Chelsea indulge fatuous, sisterhood-theme episodes — “Gutsy Women Step Up,” “Gutsy Women Refuse Hate,” “Gutsy Women Have the Last Laugh,” “Gutsy Women Have Rebel Hearts.” This is how the media never hold Hillary responsible; they just keep her on the campaign stump.
On this week’s magazine-format program CBS Sunday Morning, hostess Jane Pauley ballyhooed, “They might just be the most famous mother-and-daughter team on the planet. They’re talking, over a little lunch, with our Norah O’Donnell.” Cut to Katz’s Deli (another DNC ethnicity plug like Hillary’s insulting pandering, on a hip-hop radio program, that she always carries hot sauce in her pocketbook). At Katz’s, O’Donnell dutifully asks the Clintons, “How would you describe a ‘gutsy woman’?” The question prioritizes CBS’s feminist temerity above honesty and integrity.
CBS allowed Hillary to perpetrate her own Big Lie as a woman’s personal affront: “Was I happy when I beat Donald Trump by nearly 3 million votes but lost the Electoral College? No.” Frowning, empathetic O’Donnell, CBS Nightly News anchor, showed double-duty attentiveness. “Did I ever for a nanosecond think, ‘I’m gonna claim victory and try to get the Democrats to refuse to certify the election?’ No,” Hillary continued.
But the Federalist‘s Mollie Hemingway corrected what O’Donnell overlooked about Hillary:
In fact, within hours she instructed her team to lean into the Russia collusion hoax she bought and paid for. She tried to force electors to hear her disinfo operation prior to their vote. And Dem intel officers’ leak and sabotage campaign was in high operation in Dec. and Jan.
Yet, O’Donnell in CBS public-relations mode, never brought up these facts or recollected that Hillary, in her concession speech, issued a call to “fight.” Hillary bases her divisiveness in feminism and race patronization, the very tenets of CBS programming, from Gayle King’s This Morning to All Rise (a Michelle Obama fantasy) and Queen Latifah’s The Equalizer.
By headlining Gutsy, CBS peddles feminism through the worst examples of nepotistic feminism, deliberately ignoring Hillary controversies, whether Benghazi, or the 30,000 emails scrubbed off her private server, or the protective favor she has received from both the FBI and the Department of Justice.
In one episode, Hillary is shown painting (Hunter Biden–style?) alongside sex-rapper Meghan Thee Stallion, who defends the former first lady: “I thought she was unapologetic.” So CBS plays along, promoting feminist arrogance. This is how corporate-media feminism works: Days later, when Hillary hawked Gutsy on ABC-Disney’s The View, the audience of performing seals gave Hillary a standing ovation.
Gutsy opens on a park bench in Paris, where Clinton Foundation mother and daughter trade knock-knock jokes — the latest elitist insult to the masses. For such shameless, unsubtle media-wide political endorsement, Gutsy should be retitled “Profiles in Audacity.”
