Wounded Bird Nails It

In further focus on the superficial media treatment of Hillary Clinton, the estimable June Butler of Wounded Bird adds a lot that needs to be heard.

Usually, I admire what Charles Pierce writes, but when he wrote about the question and answer period following Hillary Clinton's speech at the Conference of the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, he was obviously still feeling the Bern. Apparently, he can't get past his Sanders love to give Hillary Clinton a break, for this is one of a series of blog posts in which he, at best, damns Clinton with faint praise, or, at worst, is outright critical, often about trivia.  Read his post; it's not long. I repost my comments to his blog post below; they are long:

Much as I like Charles Pierce, one of the best of the columnists working today, he is still part of the same media and, to some extent, shares in some of their bad habits.  And, to put no small point on it, he's a man.

I especially liked what she said so I'll post the whole thing.

Oh my gawd, Charlie. You sound like nitpicking Chuck Todd. Is this your version of bothsiderism? Clinton is who she is, and she's not going to have a personality change to suit you or anyone else before the election. Get over your issues, or at least write about something else so you do no harm...

By the end of the primaries, I liked watching Clinton speak a lot more than I liked watching Sanders speak. If I chose my candidate by likability or by which one I wanted to have a beer with, Clinton would have won hands down. But, if Sanders had won the primary vote, I'd have supported him without thinking twice.

What I would not have done is suggest that if he just changed this or that about his personal style, or if he'd just say something in a different way, he'd gather more support. Sanders is who he is, and expecting him to be other than he is, would have been completely unrealistic. It's the same with Clinton. If you don't like her, vote for Trump, write in a name, or vote for Stein or Johnson, and enable a Trump victory, but stop the bloody nitpicking about style.


TV talking heads do that stuff every day on TV, and I don't understand why a usually sensible blogger would join in. This is not even a serious policy discussion, which would be different and welcome from what we see all day, every day on TV. Yeah, I'm way down in a long thread of comments in a reply, at that, and I expect few people will read what I typed, but I sure feel better for having written.

Hey, if even Charles Pierce is exposing some of that stuff, it's especially important to note it.  The women on the video of Hillary Clinton having to take decades of on-camera sexism were hired to carry on the corporate POV, it's what TV is all about.   Charles Pierce doesn't have to do that as a condition of employment, he's, pretty much, the boss of what he says.  If he's doing it unconsciously, it certainly has a distorting effect in our politics when those so many more who have no journalistic or personal integrity do it.