I came across this incredible article about Hillary Clinton: #HillaryCoverageIsCrap.
It is >>shocking<< because it’s not only true, but glaringly obvious. And yet nobody talks about it.
Media coverage of Hillary Clinton — Hillary the candidate, even Hillary the person — is so blatantly vicious, so casually demeaning, so gleefully mean-spirited, it’s … disgusting. Horrifying. SICK.
I’d like to select out a pithy quote from it, but the whole damned article is so good, so obviously true, it’s hard to decide on the best excerpt. So here’s a big chunk of it, with some of my own bolding to emphasize more shocking parts:
Somehow, enragingly, it is acceptable for panelists of talking heads to discuss her voice, her laugh, whether she smiles enough. To admonish her for “shouting.” To talk about her hair, her clothes, her accessories. To sneer at her jokes and disdainfully disqualify any personal tidbit she shares as “pandering” and “cynical” and a desperate, pathetic attempt to connect to voters.
To openly laugh at anything she does that reveals her humanity.
This is not news coverage. This is harassment. This is rank dehumanization. This is abuse.
How have we gotten to a point where we tolerate this deeply sexist, deeply personal sustained attack on one of the most admired women in the world?
How have we allowed ourselves to become so inured to a public, ritualistic humiliation of one of our nation’s most admired public servants?
Why do we expect that this overpoweringly unhealthy dynamic should be the cost of her public service, when no man in her position – including her disgusting opponent – is subjected to anything like this level of harassment and dehumanization?
Could any other human being survive this level of aggressive, ceaseless auditing, judgment, scrutiny, and personal criticism?
Why are the media doing this to her? And why are we allowing it to happen?
Hillary is the only person in public service at this level for whom unbridled contempt is not merely acceptable, but encouraged.
There is an elite Beltway media club, dominated by conservative-leaning white men, and every reporter on the political beat wants to belong to the club – a club whose gatekeepers have set as a requirement for entry the willingness to abandon all pretense of objectivity toward Hillary.
More:
The theme that runs throughout her career in public service that she is dishonest, corrupt, compromised is accompanied by a parallel theme of exoneration. She is investigated; she is found to have done nothing wrong. She is accused; the accusations are found to be without merit. She is battered by insinuations that are, upon objective scrutiny, found to be unjustifiable.
But they are endlessly repeated nonetheless, in order to create enough smoke that some voters reflexively assume there must be a fire.
But there is no fire. There is only a smoke machine.
And still more:
I refuse to abide in silence this toxic dynamic of a culture that treats as normal the ritualistic shaming and abuse of the woman who could be our first woman president.
A-fuckin’-men.