Saturday, March 14, 2015

Our unreformed sexist media still threatened by Hillary


Kathleen Reardon, blogging at the Huffington Post (how did Reardon get a pro-Hillary post published there?!), calls out the media for "poisoning Hillary's well again." She is of course referencing the media's sexist diatribes unleashed against Hillary in 2008. Reardon, professor emerita of USC, writes:

For women around the world, and the U.S. in particular, Hillary Clinton was much more than a presidential candidate for the 2008 election. On the surface, it appears that she suffered a significant loss. But if we look historically at her campaign and how close she came to winning her party's nomination, we see the forging of an important path.
In her own words:
You can be so proud, that from now on, it will be unremarkable for a woman to win primary state victories; unremarkable to have a woman in a close race to be our nominee; unremarkable to think that a woman can be president of the United States - and that is truly remarkable, my friends.
Clinton once said that she was a Senator because of women and men who traveled in 1848 to Seneca Falls, N.Y. to participate in the first convention of women's rights in U.S. history. As Clinton explained, "My mother was born before women could vote. My daughter got to vote for her mother for president."

A few paragraphs later, Reardon jumps to present media coverage of a potential Clinton run in 2016:

One of CNN's commentators and a committed Clinton detractor during the 2008 election campaign, Gloria Borger, recently wrote that Democrats have no choice but to defend Hillary Clinton on issues like the email question because she is "their putative nominee." She quoted an unnamed, supposed "Democratic strategist" to "support" the view that Democrats are stuck with Clinton - like it or not.
Referring to Clinton as "Bigfoot Hillary," Borger proposed that there is no one of substance in the Democratic field (dismissing three impressive potential contenders). Borger concludes that should Clinton stumble, the party is in big trouble. Referring to the email matter, she added:
Those Democrats who want to defend her say there's a problem -- they're not quite sure what they're defending, because they're not sure exactly what happened, or why. In other words, the wagons are circled, but the surrogates are left outside.
This is the level of journalism to which we've become accustomed -- baseless sniping at selected candidates. Who are these Democrats? How does Borger know they're unsure? Whose wagons are circled? How about some expert testimony from named sources?

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