A radical notion sure to get me lynched. Somewhere.

[veronica_rich]

For all the women screaming "sexism!" about how neocon media outlets treated Hillary Clinton, I have one question: You don't think those same agencies wouldn't have welcomed her with open arms and lauded her ideas if her name had been Elizabeth Dole, or her surname Bush? I bet they would've.

What about the vitriol against Obama for race? Or, more accurately, criticizing him for not being "black enough" because he was not descended from "pure" black family lines or slaves? Or for turning his name into some pseudo-Muslim-terrorist e-mail forward? (Which, hell, took the majority of *peaceful* Muslims' names down into the mud along with his.) Shit, what would Faux News and CNN have done for fodder if he'd been named Tom Smith?

Ladies - let us take a moment to remember John Kerry. The man had a fucking Silver Star (maybe more than one, I don't recall) for service, and the campaign for Bush - a man who spent those same years snorting blow, drinking his weight in liquor, and probably fucking everything to cross his path in party-boy mode - still managed to convince a bunch of fellow veterans to LIE PUBLICLY about Kerry's experience in which his patrol killed a child. This is something Kerry admitted well before then in an interview, explained the circumstances that led to the accidental shooting, and expressed great regret about. Now ... even BEING a woman, if I were also a veteran, I would take more offense at being called on the carpet for my service by a draft dodger than I would at some stupid men proving yet again that the male brain IS, indeed, housed in the penis.

Personally, I think it's about time we see some anti-McCain propaganda about how he's not "soldier enough" for wanting to subject even more young men and women to the POW treatment he endured for several years. Or he's not "neocon enough" because for a while he DID abandon any support for Bush or this war - right before he went back to kissing the old chimp's ass and yelling "rah rah oil!" I'd sure like to see him be required to undergo a mental as well as physical medical evaluation - I know more than one medical professional who has watched him and commented "There's something wrong with him (medically)" and at least one longtime doctor with experience to make judgments, who said "He seems to be displaying a lot of pre-Alzheimer's symptoms."

But hey! He's white, he's old, he has a penis, he has Jesus on his side (because we know Obama isn't REALLY Christian, despite all the public airing of his relationship and break with his former longtime minister - it's just a front to dispute all that terrorist stuff!), and most importantly: He sure wouldn't allow two queers to fuck under the legal sanction of marriage in this God-blessed U.S. of A.!

Comments

[pir8fancier.livejournal.com]

My family was talking about this at dinner in response to someone who wasn't even voting for her, but felt that the media has given her a raw deal. I agree. (In the interest of disclosure, I voted for her, but I will certainly vote for Obama in November). The example that the letter to the editor gave was that one headline, in response to a delegrate sweep in some state: "Hillary steals election." I think you can look at that BOTH ways. As in, steal in baseball, which is positive. OR steal as in illegal and immoral. I have watched for weeks the sound bites coming out of Comcast as I bring up my screen. ALL NEGATIVE. And this way was before Obama had cinched the delegate count. It would be nothing more than a sentence, but I would click on it, and be surprised to see that the story behind hte negative soundbite was nothing more than a simple reporting of the facts.

Being a journalist, I'm sure you're no stranger to the concept of the hook. Make the headline dire or punative or "catchy" in order to draw the reader in. I have been, frankly, horrified at the sort of headlines that have appeared in the internet media. Nine times out of ten they did NOT reflect the story itself, and were either sensationalistic to get you to click or were downright misleading to create a negative opinion about her. The media has, IMO, hated the Clintons from day one. Remember that insane business about Bill's haircut. Which, it turned out, WAS COMPLETELY MADE-UP!!!!

So, yeah, sexist pigs.

[veronica-rich.livejournal.com]

From a purely study POV, where are you getting these headlines from? What agencies or sources do they derive from?

[pir8fancier.livejournal.com]

See example I use below. Comcast has been playing this one all night on it's news feed.

[veronica-rich.livejournal.com]

Um ... my apologies, but I'm just not seeing the hatred in this article. It's definitely an editorial with an opinionated slant, but it's not damning or mean-spirited. It's one writer's opinion, and it is credited as such. And the writer is hardly alone for raising the question about Clinton's appearance and image - analysts of Kerry after his loss questioned what might've been if he'd come down harder on his critics, faster. Analysts of Huckabee and Romney wondered if their religious fervor might have hurt them.

I confess ignorance. What am I missing?

And, it's a female writer. I'm certainly not going to cop to the "women can't be misogynists" line, because it's not true (Ann Coulter? Michelle Malkin?), but I have to admit that reading this from a female writer probably makes it more palatable to me, than from a male writer.

[veronica-rich.livejournal.com]

Or - as it suddenly occurs to me long after I hit "reply" - are you talking about the headline itself? No, it isn't the best headline an editor could've picked for it, I'll say - but it's less offensive and just more untrue, since women WERE her core base all along. (It is better than some I've seen in my career. On rare occasions, I have seen headlines that made me "WTF?" after I read the article.)

[pir8fancier.livejournal.com]

It's about the headline. But this is just one is a series of, what, maybe, 30 headlines in the last six months that made my eyebrows scrunch. I have not seen similarly innuendo-esque sort of headlines either about McCain OR Obama.

An example that I would think is similar is that McCain just had some sort of scan to see if he was cancer free (he had melanoma many years back). He got a clean bill of health, nice to hear, but the headline for him on comcast would have been something like, "McCain in picture perfect health?" To my mind, if that had been Hillary the headline would have read something like this, "Hillary Cancer Free?" It's that sort of bullshit that I'm talking about and it's been going on for MONTHS.