Was media coverage of Hillary Clinton's candidacy fair?

ok, I like this. I think there will be a lot of overlapping evidence from the issue on Hillary's gender

Not to mention Huckabee's grassroots rise through an interesting PR campaign... who knew Chuck Norris was such a big draw... other than Chuck Norris, of course!

I love this issue... mainly because I've been talking to a ton of people who support candidates other than Barack Obama, who feel that the candidacy is now solely based on PR efforts for each candidate rather than their actual opinions / work ethic. I think we should even add that as an issue... something like "Which has the greatest effect on driving a candidate to success?" (do we have a similar one already?)... we'd have to figure out the wording, but that's been a big issue... whether or not is the media has too much control over the entire situation / outcome. Just imagine if we still lived in radio-only times...

Great issue, I think. Not sure I would word it any differently

Slate Chatterbox columnist Timothy Noah writes:

With Hillary Clinton's damp moment, we witness history deciding in Yard's favor, not DiVall's. On Slate's women's blog, The XX Factor, my colleagues Melinda Henneberger, Emily Bazelon, and Meghan O'Rourke, none of them pushovers, all expressed warm approval. Even National Review Online defended Hillary's tears in a squib by John O'Sullivan, who reminded readers that Maggie Thatcher cried a couple of times when she was prime minister. The feminist debate that raged two decades ago will henceforth be settled in favor of crying. Indeed, in Clinton's case, it's proving not merely acceptable, but a positive good, because it's being taken as evidence of a previously unrevealed humanity. The only matter left to debate is whether the moment was calculated or sincere. (I believe it was sincere.)\

Gloria Steinhem' op-ed in NYT today was: Women Are Never Front-Runners:

What worries me is that reporters ignore Mr. Obama’s dependence on the old — for instance, the frequent campaign comparisons to John F. Kennedy — while not challenging the slander that [Clinton's] progressive policies are part of the Washington status quo.

From Slate's The XX Factor blog

Bill had an outburst about it yesterday.

"So you can take a shot at Mark Penn if you want. It wasn't his best day. He was hurt. He felt badly we didn't do better in Iowa," said Clinton. "But the idea that one of these campaigns is positive and the other is negative when I know the reverse is true — and I have seen it and I have been blistered by it for months — is a little tough to take. Just because of the sanitizing coverage that's in the media doesn't mean the facts aren't out there."

Yeah, good issue.

It somewhat falls under how gender affects her candidacy -- I've seen a lot of charges of sexism (Gloria Steinem today, for example).  But there is a more general issue, too, and I'm for it.

Washington Post:

Clinton's senior advisers have grown convinced that the media deck is stacked against them, that their candidate is drawing far harsher scrutiny than Barack Obama. And at least some journalists agree.

Our pr/communiactions person brought this to my attention, although it has been talked about in the media for quite some time now. It's addressing whether Hillary has taken the grunt of the negative coverage.

Has the media's coverage of Hillary Clinton's campaign been fair?