Women Journalists: Time to Take the Reins
The media failed Hillary Clinton. And the new wave of women candidates deserve better.
There is an air of unstoppability to the newly revived women’s movement and it’s marching full-speed through every industry. From Hollywood’s Time’s Up movement to the “pink wave” of politics — women are taking their seat at the table and daring society to pull it out from under them.
Every industry that is, except political journalism.
If the last presidential race showed us anything, it revealed what misogyny-fueled journalism looks like in overdrive. We learned that journalism’s reckoning with sexist coverage was not only far from the horizon, but that it would elude us entirely. Coverage is currency for politicians, and with Hillary Clinton receiving the least favorable coverage when compared to all leading male presidential contenders, the elusiveness of that reckoning came at a historically steep price.
With record numbers of women running for office and with so much to lose, why haven’t women journalists taken over the narrative? Why haven’t they staged a coup of newsrooms, demanded their voice behind the op-ed and vowed to stamp out sexist coverage?
Ironically, it was mainstream journalists who were central to breaking pivotal #metoo stories, propelling the movement forward and giving women the security of a prominent platform from which to speak out. Most notably, it was two women reporters at the New York Times, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, who initially broke the Harvey Weinstein story. Without this allyship between journalists and women, the #metoo movement, along with the work of its founder Tarana Burke, would still be mostly invisible. However, this allyship between women politicians and journalists has largely been absent in the world of political coverage.
Coverage of Clinton has always fallen somewhere on a spectrum between being merely petty to downright vilifying — even the most flattering coverage is often dripping with reluctance. Before the 2016 election, this was just your typical gendered fodder packaged as political journalism; and we were naïve to its harm. But following Trump’s win, the damage of the media’s biased coverage gained more serious scrutiny, as election postmortems examined every corner of Clinton’s campaign looking for clues to her loss. In all those examinations, one culprit continued to rear its head: the media’s nearly obsessive focus on perceived Clinton scandals and most notably, those damn emails as Bernie Sanders put it.
The 2017 report from the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard showed that Clinton’s emails, the Clinton Foundation and Benghazi dominated coverage during the 2016 election cycle. In contrast, Clinton’s positions on reproductive issues or even more pressing, gun control, didn’t make the cut. For instance, take Clinton’s 2015 statement in which she said Australian style gun-control measures were “worth looking at.” Though not a full-throated endorsement of the policy, it is one of the more extreme proposals to addressing America’s own gun violence problem, and certainly worthy of more mention and analyses than it received.
On June 10, 2016, shortly after Clinton secured the nomination, she delivered a speech to Planned Parenthood Action Fund members, where she vowed that “as president, [she would] always have your back…” Clinton’s speech mirrored her commitment to reproductive healthcare access, a position that was also outlined on the “Women’s Issues” page on her campaign website. It should be noted that Trump’s campaign website, had no such equivalent page. In fact, on the single page where his positions were outlined, albeit with an anemic level of detail, the word “woman” did not appear once.
Coincidentally, on the same day as Clinton’s Planned Parenthood speech in 2016, CNN ran the story “Are Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump the same person?” — a colossus of false equivalencies. Additionally, the Guardian, apparently not wanting to hedge any journalistic bets, decided to forgo originality altogether, running the story, “Could Hillary Clinton really be indicted over her emails?” The story featured a photo of a beleaguered-looking Clinton — her head rests on her hand while she nonchalantly checks her mobile phone. The photo seems to say to readers “I couldn’t care less. Indict me.”
Again, on the very same day, and because sexist coverage isn’t complete without a good catfight, the Washington Post ran this piece: Elizabeth Warren’s up-and-down relationship with Hillary Clinton began with a 1998 op-ed.
In hindsight, the loss of a Clinton presidency proved to be the media’s most costly casualty. But if we were all granted a do-over of 2016 by the election goddesses, would journalists shift the narrative, focusing less on scandal and more on policy? Or at the very least, focus less on her emails.
Now, with the surge of female candidates running in the 2018 election cycle, might this be an opportunity for the beginning of that do-over? Midterms often predict the climate of upcoming presidential elections. If the media narrative for women running for office in November begins to shift, this could lay the groundwork for fairer, less gendered journalistic terrain for women who run for office beyond the midterms, including 2020 contenders.
But if recent coverage is any indicator of how women will be portrayed in 2020, we’re off to a terrible start: coverage of high profile women since the election, suggests that despite the hard lessons of 2016, little has changed.
Take the women who often appear on 2020 presidential shortlists: Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is often painted as someone who’s earned our suspicion. In the only piece featuring a woman under FiveThirtyEight’s 2020 Elections series, the article asks “What Is Kirsten Gillibrand Up To?” and refers to the Senator’s political rise as “calculating,” later adding that “In order to win [Gillibrand] has evolved her positions, changed her mind … flip-flopped, in less polite terms.” Sound familiar?
In a Politico piece, “Kamala Harris’ rapid rise confounds California,” the Senator is portrayed as having a “mysterious” political rise. The piece features quotes from several male politicians who condescendingly allude to Harris being overly ambitious, including this quote from a democratic strategist: “If you’re Kamala Harris, I guess you can have visions of sugar plums dancing in your head… but California voters have just not taken very kindly to their politicians running for president.” His comments mix an air of infantilization with the caution not to get too big for her britches.
When women politicians aren’t being questioned about their ability to lead, they’re being punished for being too good, over prepared, or rising too quickly for the tastes of lurkers posing as well-meaning observers. In Chuck Todd’s analysis of the first general election debate, for which he’s since been widely criticized, he faulted Clinton for being “over prepared.” More recently in this Slate piece, after winning the California primary by 30 points, Senator Dianne Feinstein was blamed for the Democratic party’s supposed inertia. And the party’s backing of the long-tenured senator was described as being an example of the party’s “gerontocracy [which was] driven primarily by careerism and convenience.” In the same piece, Feinstein was described as being “well-versed in the kind of collaborative bipartisan politics that no longer exists in the United States Congress.” While noting Feinstein’s talent at bipartisanship, that experience was framed as being past its used-by date and obsolete. In a single article, criticism of Feinstein hinted at her being too old, too experienced and charged that she’d taken a spot that could have been occupied by her younger, male opponent.
A big part of the problem of course, is the lack of gender parity in journalism: men write roughly 80% of Op-Eds and are responsible for 66% of political coverage. Male journalists even write a larger percent of reproductive issues stories at 52%.
But gender parity isn’t the only problem. Internalized sexism fueled a fair amount of 2016’s coverage and there was no shortage of women journalists eager to regurgitate sexist talking points. Less than two months before election day, women were cranking out pieces like this one from Politico, “Clinton sells sick days as campaign reset,” which hinted to Clinton’s presumed tendency for deceit, even while recovering from pneumonia. Without a shred of empathy, Clinton is described as “spinning her untimely bout of pneumonia as a blessing in disguise that allowed her to hit the reset button on a campaign [that was] slowly losing altitude.”
Journalism is overdue for its own hashtag driven movement, a concerted campaign that would push for long-term, focused attention on reaching equal representation. But with midterms just around the corner and presidential campaigns ramping up shortly afterwards, we simply cannot wait for journalism to catch up. Women journalists need to position themselves as the first line of defense for the new wave of women politicians. They should lead in applying the same journalistic standards of objectivity, fairness, and probity that has historically been applied to coverage of male politicians. We need women to correct the narrative for other women, right now.
Many of the women running in November are brand new to politics. They’ve left jobs, changed their entire life’s trajectory; and some are even breastfeeding on the campaign trail. Women are taking enormous risks to shift the imbalance of representation in government. Political coverage needs to match their bravery.
Instead of asking whether women are qualified to hold office or how they’ll juggle motherhood with the demanding schedule of an elected office, ask them how they will assure paid parental leave, address the maternal mortality rate or fix the gender wage gap.
Applying the “rule of reversibility should be a journalist’s weapon of choice when fighting gender-biased coverage: if you wouldn’t write something about a man, don’t write it about a woman. And if you wouldn’t ask a question of a man, don’t ask it of a woman. During Cynthia Nixon’s first TV interview since announcing her run for governor of New York on The Wendy Williams Show, the very first question from Williams was about Nixon’s was hair, taking nearly 4 minutes before asking about her campaign. Nixon’s hair is unremarkable by any reasonable measure and certainly not newsworthy. In contrast, there are plenty of hairstyles worn by male politicians for whom one could easily spend an entire news cycle exploring, yet it would be rare to hear an interview with a male candidate open with such questions.
Journalists should employ the “views not shoes” approach with obsessive regularity. Women who need to know how candidates will end sexual violence or tackle domestic abuse will be forgiving if the election season ends without their ever knowing whether a given candidate prefers pencil skirts to pantsuits. Shortly before the 2008 election cycle, in a Washington Post article, fashion correspondent Robin Givhan made much ado over Hillary Clinton’s cleavage when covering Clinton’s address to the Senate about student debt, writing “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… There wasn’t an unseemly amount of cleavage showing, but there it was. Undeniable.” One might argue that it is expected that a fashion correspondent would pontificate on the meaning of a woman politician’s neckline — they are in the business of fashion afterall. But this was the wrong woman, the wrong time, and the wrong place. Around the same time, a report was published by The Project on Student Debt revealing that student debt had outpaced salaries. And Clinton was doing her best to address this issue on the senate floor that day. However, it was her cleavage which took centerstage.
Women journalists need to tell the real stories of women running for office because they have something personal at stake. They know what it’s like to have their effectiveness questioned because they have families or the sting of seeing a plum assignment given to a man who is less qualified. And because progressive women in government tend to focus on legislation that benefits other women, all sides win.
From the moment a woman decides to enter politics, she hands her story over to journalists who will own it and repackage it for the rest of her career. When she tells us her positions, they tell us how to interpret them. When she reveals her qualifications to lead, they tell us that she’s over-prepared, or too ambitious and that she should wait her turn. When she shares what she cares about most, we are told it’s a lie, a cunning ruse. When she tells us she may be the last thing between us and the apocalypse, we are told that only her scandals mattered. We’re paying the price for handing over our stories to people who cannot get beyond seeing women politicians as merely women and who subject them to different standards than they do men.
And as Hillary Clinton said in “What Happened,” “The Moment a woman steps forward and says “I’m running for office,” It begins: the analysis of her face, her body, her voice, her demeanor; the diminishment of her stature, her ideas, her accomplishments, her integrity. It can be unbelievably cruel.”
The same cruel climate that for too long, has given women politicians a raw deal and played an undeniable role in Trump’s ascendance, is urgently due for a takeover; and the women who’ve stepped forward to lead us out of Trump’s rein, deserve better than the media climate they are stepping into. Who better to be at the helm of this takeover than women journalists.
