Pantsuits and the Presidency

Original Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/opinion/22pubed.html?pagewanted=print

By CLARK HOYT

SOME supporters of Hillary Clinton believe that sexism colored news coverage of her presidential campaign. The Times reported in a front-page article on June 13 that many are proposing boycotts of cable news networks and that a “Media Hall of Shame” has been created by the National Organization for Women.

The Times itself, however, was barely mentioned, even though two of its Op-Ed columnists, Maureen Dowd and William Kristol, were named in the Hall of Shame.

Peggy Aulisio of South Dartmouth, Mass., said, “A real review of your own stories and columns is warranted.” I think so too. And I think a fair reading suggests that The Times did a reasonably good job in its news articles. But Dowd’s columns about Clinton’s campaign were so loaded with language painting her as a 50-foot woman with a suffocating embrace, a conniving film noir dame and a victim dependent on her husband that they could easily have been listed in that Times article on sexism, right along with the comments of Chris Matthews, Mike Barnicle, Tucker Carlson or, for that matter, Kristol, who made the Hall of Shame for a comment on Fox News, not for his Times work.

“I’ve been twisting gender stereotypes around for 24 years,” Dowd responded. She said nobody had objected to her use of similar images about men over seven presidential campaigns. She often refers to Barack Obama as “Obambi” and has said he has a “feminine” management style. But the relentless nature of her gender-laden assault on Clinton — in 28 of 44 columns since Jan. 1 — left many readers with the strong feeling that an impermissible line had been crossed, even though, as Dowd noted, she is a columnist who is paid not to be objective.

Over the course of the campaign, I received complaints that Times coverage of Clinton included too much emphasis on her appearance, too many stereotypical words that appeared to put her down and dismiss a woman’s potential for leadership and too many snide references to her as cold or unlikable. When I pressed for details, the subject often boiled down to Dowd.

Andrew Rosenthal, the editor of the editorial page, said it was unfair to hold a columnist accountable for perceptions of bias in news coverage. A columnist is supposed to present strong opinions, he said, and “a thorough reading of Maureen’s work shows that she does that without regard to gender, partisanship or ideology.”

Some complaints about Times news coverage seem justified. A “Political Memo” last fall analyzed “the Clinton Cackle” — a laugh, it was suggested, that she used to fend off political attacks or tough media attention. Cackle? That’s what witches do in fairy tales. Times editors express regret about using the word, though they defend the examination of the laugh. The Times never did a similar dissection of the way Rudolph Giuliani burst into odd gales of laughter under tough questioning.

But other complaints seemed to reflect a shoot-the-messenger anger at The Times. A reader from San Francisco railed against a litany of offending words that she said the paper had used, but most of the slights were imagined. (I can assure you that the word “skank” was never printed in an article about Clinton.)

I asked my assistant, Michael McElroy, to run a database search for some key words that might indicate sexism in The Times — “shrill,” “strident,” “pantsuit” and “giggle,” among them. I also asked Kathleen Hall Jamieson, who has written on women and leadership and is a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, to take a look at articles turned up by the search or that readers had complained about.

Jamieson found some things to criticize, but she said, “If one is creating a comparative continuum, The New York Times is not on the sexist, stereotypical high end.” She put the paper “on the careful end.” Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said the group’s content studies showed that The Times was better than the media generally at balancing assertions that Clinton was not likable.

Jamieson noted the occasional “improbably blue pantsuit” or “no-nonsense pantsuit,” and said such terms would never be used to describe a man’s clothing. She pointed to one article that said Clinton “shouted” into a microphone — an example, she said, from a vocabulary of negative words applied to women speaking in public that are seldom if ever used to describe men.

She said that she was more concerned about references that, consciously or unconsciously, seemed to cast doubt on Clinton as a serious leader, like a sentence in an article last month that said Clinton “may not have passed the commander in chief test” with voters. Jamieson said that majorities of voters in The Times’s own polls thought Clinton could be an effective commander in chief. She suspected that a bias within The Times that Clinton could not be an effective leader of the military allowed the sentence to slip through. But Jodi Kantor, the reporter, said she was referring to the fact that, although neither Clinton nor Obama had military experience, far more voters doubted her ability to be commander in chief than his.

Richard Stevenson, the editor in charge of campaign coverage, said, “We should have parsed the polling on this a little more closely,” but he denied that newsroom sexism was involved. He said editors know that they are accused of having “embedded assumptions” and try to filter them out.

Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, said that as the highest-ranking woman in the newsroom, she thinks a lot about the potential for sexism in coverage and looks to eliminate gratuitous references to a woman’s appearance or voice without “being so politically correct that you interfere with a reporter’s descriptive voice.”

Politically correct is never a term one would apply to Dowd’s commentary. Her columns this year said Clinton’s “message is unapologetically emasculating,” and that she “needed to prove her masculinity” but in the end “had to fend off calamity by playing the female victim.” In one column Dowd wrote, “She may want to take a cue from the Miss America contest: make a graceful, magnanimous exit and wait in the wings.”

“From the time I began writing about politics,” Dowd said, “I have always played with gender stereotypes and mined them and twisted them to force the reader to be conscious of how differently we view the sexes.” Now, she said, “you are asking me to treat Hillary differently than I’ve treated the male candidates all these years, with kid gloves.”

Aulisio, the reader who wanted a review of Times coverage, asked if a man could have gotten away with writing what Dowd wrote. Rosenthal said that if the man had written everything Dowd had written over the years and established himself as a sardonic commentator on the sexes, “I’d say the answer is yes.”

Of course, there is no such man, and I do not think another one could have used Dowd’s language. Even she, I think, by assailing Clinton in gender-heavy terms in column after column, went over the top this election season.