-- Pundits kept saying again and again and again that Hillary would be vulnerable in the election because of long-dead "scandals" from Bill Clinton's presidency, such as Whitewater and Monicagate.

This might have been understandable, except for one thing: Hillary's rival candidates clearly decided not to make any issue of these "scandals." The only people bringing them up at all were those same pundits who were predicting that they would matter. While Bill did turn out to be a liability for her on the campaign trail, there was never the slightest bit of evidence that his presidency itself would be a liability -- but pundits kept predicting it would anyway, injecting the idea into the dialog on a regular basis.

You're thinking about this from the primary election viewpoint as to why Bill Clinton's past scandals were not used during the primary election. Bill Clinton is a former President, and for fellow Democrats to attack Hillary Clinton on this would have been anathema.

However, in the general election, if Clinton was the nominee, it's clear the GOP would've been trumpeting these scandals left and right to undermine her electability and to gin up the right-wing voters to the polls in November.

how are we to gauge if the media's treatment of hillary was unfair if there is no counterbalancing list of 'bogus' coverage on obama ?

do you really think hillary would have won if not for the all-powerful Drudge and his flying monkeys in the MSM, hillary's gaffes and strategic failures and former-president-related baggage notwithstanding?

another of your unanswerables, i suppose.

Greg, I wondered what you'd write about once Hillary lost.

Looks like you're still going to write about Hillary and defend her.

Your post puts her in an extremely undeserved positive light.

How about pointing out how unfair the media has been to Obama? Or pointing out how unfair it was when Clinton tried to associate Obama with Hamas and William Ayers on live television in front of 10 million people? Oh wait, thats right, you won't do any of those things.

You asked, "Was it more unfair to Hillary than to Obama?" You then proceeded to list a bunch of things that you deem unfair coverage of Hillary. I would say you are being more unfair to Obama than to Hillary.

I don't really see this as a situation where agreeing or disagreeing makes any real sense. You've compiled a nice long list of instances where the media has had ridiculous, biased and/or unfair reporting on Hillary Clinton.

Newsflash: Biased, misleading, corporate shilling, etc. IS the modern news media.

Clinton and her people must have anticipated stupid asinine media b.s. right? How could they not after all they went thru in the Bill Clinton years?

Yet they never developed a good strategy to deal with it or even to combat it, other than playing the victim, which just added to the snowball of poor coverage.

Just add it to the list of things the Clintons did wrong.

Was the media coverage often outrageous and unfair? Yes.

But it was a national campaign, they should have anticipated it and had a strategy to combat it, rather than using SNL as their shield, and then declaring Fox News the most fair news network of the season...making the Clinton camp look equally outrageous.

It also bears mentioning that it isn't as if the media exactly avoided outrageous or unfair coverage when it came to Obama either. There was plenty to go around. But the Obama camp didn't go around talking up Fox and using the media as a whipping boy at every event either, and as a result they weathered it better.

Just my humble opinion.

Greg Sargent is a biased and worthless hack.

who cares.... our media sucks. you only had to tune in this weekend for the tim russert wank fest to find that out. like there wasn't a single other story they could cover... ridiculous. we should all be ashamed.

our media need to be scrubbed clean top to bottom...

Listen, I know the media said some unkind and unflattering things about Hillary. Some were sexist and many others were the result of Clinton-fatigue.

But I know lots of women who voted were initially cool to Clinton but voted for her out of backlash. I doubt she lost a single vote because of something Chris Matthews said but I know she gained some.

Had it not been for women rallying in defiance of what they perceived as sexism, she would have been out of this campaign a long time ago!

I find it amusing to watch people twist themselves into logical pretzels to jump down Greg's throat. Given that many people who supported Hillary are still pushing the meme of biased media playing a key role in her loss, it should be a natural exercise to go to the tape and actually detail out exactly what was said or spread by the media about Hillary and her campaign. Greg deserves kudos for doing that.

There are at least two key points, which cannot be as easily analyzed but come up in conjunction with the media bias against Hillary arguments:

- was the media as unfair or worse to Obama with Muslim smears and the sensationalization of his association with Wright, Ayers, et al. (the notorious ABC debate)? Greg did specifically refer to that, and he's right: you can't compare the two. I suppose you could count how many major media outlets would pass on various smears of either candidate, but how would you grade that. Or do you do a survey where you ask the average Joe "Do you know about Obama and Wright?" vs "Do you know about Hillary comparing MLK to Lyndon Johnson?" Only then can you get a sense of how widespread these attacks were, and even then you can't really assess their effectiveness.

- was the media in league with Obama and/or Hillary's campaign? Both campaigns have accused the media of conspiring with the other, and its conspiracy crap like this which feeds on itself, and will ultimately discourage voters. The Drudge report early on about Hillary staffers pushing the Obama picture seemed crafted to indicate that Hillary had a direct line to the press, while later on Hillary's campaign fed fuel to the fire that Obama had the media in his pocket. That particular accusation is very sad, because it leads into a vicious circle with people taking Obama's strong image and twisting it into accusations of something cultish and obsessive.

Just because Hillary's Sargent At Arms keeps on repeating it, that does not make it the truth.

Here is what Pew research discovered when they looked into the same claims:

http://journalism.org/node/11266

Excerpt: Use link to read the full article.

Character and the Primaries of 2008
May 29, 2008

If campaigns for president are in part a battle for control of the master narrative about character, Democrat Barack Obama has not enjoyed a better ride in the press than rival Hillary Clinton, according to a new study of primary coverage by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.

From January 1, just before the Iowa caucuses, through March 9, following the Texas and Ohio contests, the height of the primary season, the dominant personal narratives in the media about Obama and Clinton were almost identical in tone, and were both twice as positive as negative, according to the study, which examined the coverage of the candidates’ character, history, leadership and appeal—apart from the electoral results and the tactics of their campaigns.

The trajectory of the coverage, however, began to turn against Obama, and did so well before questions surfaced about his pastor Jeremiah Wright. Shortly after Clinton criticized the media for being soft on Obama during a debate, the narrative about him began to turn more skeptical—and indeed became more negative than the coverage of Clinton herself. What’s more, an additional analysis of more general campaign topics suggests the Obama narrative became even more negative later in March, April and May.

This debate is maddening because people--including you, Greg--conflate simply unfair coverage with sexist coverage. The Times piece you cite is mostly about sexism in the media, but the items mentioned here are mostly unfair treatment (aside from the cackle and voice and don't forget the cleavage coverage) and it's hard to know how much the unfair treatment derived from sexism or Hillary's frontrunner status or anti-Clinton bias...

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One thing is clear: Journalists could make sexist remarks with impunity. For example, your own Josh Marshall's suggestion that Hillary castrated Mark Penn was extremely sexist, not just for a progressive blog but for a right-wing blog. JMM wouldn't be caught dead making a similarly racist comment.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/187620.php
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My nutshell take is that Hillary received clearly tougher coverage than Obama for most of the race and that coverage was often disturbingly sexist--especially on Obama-Central, MSNBC. The coverage started to even out in March, with the arrival of Jeremiah Wright and "Bitter" but by then, as well all know, the race was effectively over. Obama, as I said, received generally cushy coverage until he became the frontrunner. I'm thinking particularly of the McClurkin episode, which the mainstream media mostly ignored. If they hadn't it could have really hurt already-ailing campaign.

Oh brother, the clintons lost. It is over. This list is a bunch of bunk. She got kid glove treatment from the media and that's a fact. No media outlets ever delved into her bs experience claim. She was annointed by the media as inevitable. Nobody went into depth into the clintons' 90's scandals as well as what the clintons have been doing since 2000 and their "foundations" or the donors to the library. Or how about that she was toast since February? They kept making it sound like a horse race when it was soooo over. You could write a piece ten times as long or more about how she got a huge break from the media.

Comeon greg, what's the gig? Are you married to a clinton relative or do you guys get huge bucks from one of the clintons "foundations"? This is sooo absurd.

Obama is the candidate of the Democratic party. What's done is done. It's up to him, now, to prove that he was worthy of the nomination, by winning the general election. Too late for backward-looking, or second guessing, now.

Just once, could we have a discussion about anything written by Greg or Eric that doesn't center around some version of "you're in the tank for Hillary"?

Greg's right. The media coverage of Hillary was unconscionable. That was the topic of the post. Of course media treatment of Obama was unconscionable as well. They're both DEMOCRATS, for God's sake, and this is how the media plays this game - by piliing on Democrats and giving passes to Republicans. But just noting that the media slimed Hillary doesn't mean anyone is "in the tank" anymore than noting that the sky is blue means that anyone is predjudiced because blue is their favorite color.

That having been said, I hope all the Hillary supporters who read what Greg has written here will take note: yes, there was sexism in the campaign - but it didn't come from the Obama camp, it came from the media, whence most unfair smears against Democrats originate and are spread.

One final thing I'll note - I think Greg has missed the boat on only one point in making the case about media misbehavoir vis a vis Clinton, and that is that in a lot of ways, her campaign itself set the dynamic in motion by choosing to go with an "inevitability" theme. Because even before the current era in which Democrats are always considered fair game by the media, frontrunners since the beginning of time have been fair game. If you're out there front and center crowing about how you're the inevitable nominee, all it does is draw more fire, sooner. That of course does not excuse media malfeasance in willfully misreporting, taking quotes out of context, etc, but it is a fact and the brain trust in Hillaryland were idiots for not taking that into account before settling on "inevitability" as one of their main calling cards.

Wow - can I just say ditto that on every last word under Erica Barnett's blog Greg linked to above?

http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/05/violet_socks_at_reclusive_leftistprobabl

Yes, I am a Hillary supporter who will support Obama and do whatever I can to ensure NOT MCCAIN in November. But make no mistake I will also speak out when Michelle Obama faces sexist attacks, but in the course of doing so I will expose the hypocrisy of those who rush to defend Michelle but were silent when even more vicious attacks were launched on Hillary. That includes the DNC which was silent in the face of these repeated sexist attacks, the Obama campaign including Michelle Obama, and many democrats who excused or participated in these types of attacks on the blogosphere and our culture at large.

This is more than about why Hillary lost because the reason for her loss was not sexism. But it is about who we are as democrats and whether this type of sexism is acceptable against the next female presidentail candidate, or Michelle Obama or Nancy Pelosi and it's an issue that needs to be addressed

Greg, forget Drudge. Nobody respects him except Mark Halperin. Let's talk instead about Senior Hillary campaign advisor Sidney Blumenthal's media smear campaign against Obama.

Clintons vs. the Media: Live by the Sword, Die by the Sword

As many others have pointed out, both Clinton and Obama were treated unfairly by the media's preference for puffery, though Clinton definitely benefitted from their laziness far more than it hurt her -- from the lack of vetting of her 35 years of experience, to the prolonging of a race any other candidate in the same position would have been run out of long before the official and final end.

People who are so weak minded that they'd be swayed by something like that on CNN aren't *watching* CNN- they've got soaps and football to contend with.

There were a few instances of out and out sexism that contaminated the pundit class (the cackle, the tears) but the Clintons weren't stupid. They knew *exactly* how to capitalize on it. Any politician who wants the presidency is going to have to be able to handle the kind of dreck you get out of journalists who are chosen for their TV face more than their skills.

She's not a bad person, just a bad campigner. Out of all the reasons HRC's candidacy failed, I put that one at the bottom of the list.

This is an interesting list, Greg. You might also have mentioned the repeated discussion of cleavage, pants suits, wrinkles, and weight. Those things flew by me as minor irritants, but when I saw them spliced together on a YouTube video, I was pretty embarrassed that I hadn't seen the larger pattern myself.

Two points for the sake of conversation:

1) At one point Clinton responded to Rush Limbaugh's comments about her appearance by saying how Rush had always had a big crush on her, that he'd always had a thing for her, etc. That floored me. It was witty, disarming, and sarcastic at the same time, but it also seemed to invite voters to see her in specifically gendered terms. I'd be interested to know how others would unpack that bizarre statement.

2) I wish Clinton would have made a major speech on gender the way Obama did on race. With the exception of her concession speech, she seemed to prefer sound byte-level comments rather than extended analyses. And even in the concession speech, it seemed to be more of a framing device (here's how to understand the narrative of my campaign) than something she wanted to educate Americans about.

I can't understand why Clinton didn't take on the issue in a sustained way. Even now, her supporters are urging Obama to give that kind of speech (which I suspect he will when the Republicans attack Michele.) We will all be better for an Obama discussion of gender in American life, but I have to wonder why Clinton never addressed the issue herself.