Media miscasts Clinton’s character

An audience of 2,000 roared as former first lady, New York senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took the stage at Carnegie Mellon’s Skibo Gym to deliver a campaign address.

I was a bit more apprehensive.

A candidate who veteran Washington journalist Bob Woodward told to “get off this screaming stuff” on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” didn’t give me expectations of feeling warm and fuzzy, much less inspired. But as Clinton started her stump speech, I couldn’t help but wonder whether this was the same Hillary Clinton I had heard about on television, or just a very convincing, much more appealing body double.

Where even left-leaning media outlets, such as the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, portray the Democratic front-runner as a “divisive” figure, her speech stressed the importance of “bringing us together” and building bridges. Where both newspapers and network news outlets discuss the exceptionally aggressive tone of the Clinton campaign, the candidate herself didn’t call out a single opponent once in her speech. While the media portrays her as a morally questionable political drone, the unfair characterization doesn’t do her justice.

At CMU, the former Secretary of State compared her own brand of progressive pragmatism to idealistic rhetoric — the closest she came to calling out primary rival Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. Her speech reflected a candidate steadfast in her convictions, far removed from her caricature in the media as a slave to opinions polls.

Clinton has a lengthy history of ending up on the short end of media hostility. But coverage of the candidate during this election’s Democratic primary has reached a point where it no longer bears a passing resemblance to reality. Negatively biased press — directed largely against the former Secretary of State — has fundamentally altered the Sanders-Clinton race.

From the Clintons’ first appearance on the national stage in 1992, scandals that eventually lead nowhere have come with alarming regularity. With a large set of 20-year-old controversies to drudge up, near-constant hostile coverage of Clinton’s personal life hasn’t inspired her to be pleasant toward the press.

“When you get beat up so often, you get cautious,” former Clinton White House press secretary Mike McCurry told Politico Magazine in May 2014.

And Clinton’s relationship with the media is nothing if not cautious. At a parade in Gorham, New Hampshire, last Fourth of July, Clinton’s campaign corralled reporters away from her with a rope as she walked. Although media corrals are not unheard-of in American campaigns, Wall Street Journal reporter Carol Lee complained on CNN’s “State of the Union” the next day that the Clinton campaign had “penned [reporters] off like farm animals.”

Hillary Clinton’s standoffish approach toward the media, while perhaps understandable in context, doesn’t give news outlets any incentive to play nice. In the aftermath of the Fourth of July debacle, Daily Beast executive editor Noah Shachtman tweeted his advice to reporters that they “write a hit piece” in retaliation for their treatment.

For Clinton specifically, there’s also the undeniable consideration of latent sexism in the type of media coverage she most often receives. It’s significant that her reputation for dishonesty stems from a history of scandals that isn’t entirely hers. Former president Bill Clinton, who has contributed more than his fair share to the family’s backlog of scandal, has had significantly less of a problem avoiding a reputation for lying than his wife.

The overwhelming emphasis on issues, such as Benghazi, her private email server at the State Department and her speeches to large corporations like Goldman Sachs during the 2016 election cycle, show the media’s excess focus on Clinton. Reports that former Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice also used private email servers to handle confidential documents received far less media attention.

Clearly, the interest in investigating Clinton’s private server has to do with more than mass thirst for the truth.

But with Sanders’ entrance into the race last spring, the press found something even more lucrative: an underdog.

If you asked the typical Sanders supporter, you’d likely hear that the media is highly unfavorable toward their candidate. In fact, hundreds of them decided last Monday to tell CNN themselves, picketing the news network’s New York headquarters and demanding more airtime for the democratic socialist.

But simply looking at news outlets’ profit incentives suggests that it’s in their best interest for Sanders to do somewhat well. A close race for the Democratic nomination stirs up far more interest, far more viewership and far more income than an easy, coronation-style victory for Clinton. It’s particularly surprising to note that, although the media afterglow of Sanders’s 13-point win in Wisconsin last week seemed to suggest an increasingly competitive race, the Vermont senator actually fell further behind his delegate targets in the state. If the news media covers Sanders or his campaign, it’s because of his ability to help sell the news.

It’s not hard to find a likely Democratic voter who distrusts Hillary Clinton. It’s also not hard to find someone who thinks Clinton is frittering away her advantages in a primary race against a political nobody. What’s more difficult to find is someone who recognizes that media narratives repeated ad nauseam over the course of the past two-and-a-half decades have an important role to play in this perception.

If voters find Hillary Clinton off-putting because she’s “artificial” and Bernie Sanders appealing because he’s “authentic,” they should keep in mind that personal coverage of Clinton has been almost constantly accusatory, while coverage of the latter’s personal life has been virtually non-existent.

Some might argue that no coverage is worse than bad coverage. In that respect, Clinton actually still ends up better off being savaged by the media. There’s certainly evidence for that statement on the Republican side, where near-universal name recognition for front-runner Donald Trump has helped drive his electoral successes.

It’s true that Sanders’ name recognition remains significantly lower than Clinton’s. Nevertheless, among voters who are familiar with the candidate, the Vermont senator has almost an exclusive position to frame himself and his story. Hillary Clinton is confined and boxed in by a quarter century of inflammatory coverage to the point where she can no longer control the narrative. And that narrative is usually less than charitable to the candidate.

There are two Hillary Clintons running for president, and voters need to distinguish between them. One of them exists in the popular imagination as a strident, dishonest puppet of the Democratic establishment. The other is strong, inspiring, passionate and ultimately, presidential.

If attending last week’s Clinton rally proved anything to me, it’s that voters deserve to see both sides.

Henry primarily writes on government and domestic policy for The Pitt News.

Write Henry at hgg7@pitt.edu.