...feminists still have a whole lot of work to do. The news media like to pretend they are entirely objective and wholly separate from entertainment media and other cultural outlets. And yet, at their core, they do the same thing soap operas do: they tell stories. In this case the story is about a ball-busting, cold, heartless, crybaby shrew-bitch of a presidential candidate. Sounds like it could make a juicy story, right?
I'm willing to bet that our brains would cease to process information if we didn't keep feeding them stories. We love stories, we understand stories, we relate to the world through stories.
Stories, as we learned in elementary school, have plot points and conflict. They also are have characters. Even the newsyest news is filled with characters. These characters don't come out of thin air. They have their basis in observed reality, but also in our collective imagination--they are creations of our culture. None of this is a problem--unless, of course, we elevate them as capital-T Truth, missing the countless opportunities to learn from news narratives about who we are as a culture, and where we are headed. We can love our stories and be critical of them at the same time. It is all too easy to put news media on a pedestal of neutrality and ignore the real lessons we could be learning from the news about our own cultural mythologies. Fox news can call itself fair and balanced, or anything else it wants, but Fox, along with every other news agency, is made of humans.
Case in point: the 2008 Democratic primaries.
I am one of many females I know who voted for Obama in the primaries, and yet ended the whole thing with an icky taste in my mouth. That icky taste had to do with the way gender stereotypes were flagrantly used against Hillary Clinton. Wherever the caricatures started, they were perpetuated by the news media. If Clinton didn't resonate emotionally, it was because she was a woman. If she showed her emotions too much, it was because she was a woman. When pundits ran out of mean things to say about her as a person, they talked about her clothing and her body, in ways that no male candidate had to put up with. We were subjected to endless discussions of pantsuits and cankles- it just didn't seem like a fair fight. I think all of us, even those who thought that Obama was the better candidate wanted to see a fair fight.
When Clinton rallied at the New Hanmpshire primaries and exceeded media expectations at the polls, everyone had a theory. Rachel Maddow's theory was perhaps the most interesting. She stunned Chris Matthews by referencing a Talking Points Memo post that suggested people were supporting Hillary Clinton because they were tired of seeing her bullied on the basis of her gender by the likes of Chris Matthews.
This "tweety-effect" theory got people talking, and eventually Chris Matthews was forced to appologize. Sort of.
When a kid gets put in time out so he can sit and think about what he's done, it's with the hope that he won't do it again. Or at least not right away. The day after Chris Matthews vowed never to underestimate Clinton, he was making even more incendiary statements, claiming that she wasn't qualified for her candidacy and had only made it so far because people felt sorry for her for being cheated on by her husband. Chris Matthews seemed incapable of talking about Hillary Clinton without objectifying her.
I don't think this is because Chris Matthews is stupid or really, really forgetful. It's because sexism is very entrenched in this country, deeply embedded in our language and our culture.
The following video shows both male and female anchors using sexist stereotypes to analyze the outcome of the primaries (which by that point Hillary had lost). There are a few things in this video that disturb me. One of themost disturbing is that after claiming sexism wasn't a big factor in the coverage of the primary, or the primary itself, one of the male anchors then compares Clinton to a shreiky first wife at divorce court (around the 2:20 mark).
Some other tidbits that I found annoying:
1) since when are racism and sexism mutually exclusive? since when does one of these issues have to be more important than the other? (Okay, maybe since forever--Women were marginalized in civil rights movements, people of color were marginalized in women's rights movements, and LGBT people in all the movements. Still, there's no excuse for it.) We are not past racism and we are not past sexism. The job of the media is to courageously investigate all forms of power, including racism and sexism, without perpetuating either racism or sexism. Apparently we need to try a little harder.
2) um, last time I checked sexism isn't just a "women's thing." The guy at 6:23 in the video brushes off serious concerns with a hey, we all "have women in our lives" who thought Hillary wasn't given a fair treatment. Basically, in one fell swoop he manages to associate a widely-held view entirely with women and marginalize that view (and the women holding it) as unimportant. This guy could clearly stand to listen a little more to the women in his life. As could the news media in general, which is notoriously dominated by men at the higher levels, and which operates within a male-dominated culture.
No, sexism isn't dead. Yes, it infiltrates the media, and seriously people, is this really news?
Following this story left me feeling disheartened with the news media, Chris Matthews in particular, both the Clinton and Obama campaigns, and pretty much everyone involved except for Rachel Maddow. I still have faith in you Rachel, please don't ever let me down!
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