Hillary and the media...

While I will be the first to admit that I don't know as much as I should about our current presidential candidates, I do know something about Hillary Clinton. I don't know about her campaign, but I know about her personal life. This seems rather odd to me. My point is that the media has created a biased campaign; they have focused more on Hillary's personal life than her goals as a potential President. I think that a large part of this problem is affected by Clinton's gender. Women and men are obviously portrayed differently in the media, and I believe that this is creating an unfair advantage for the male candidates. I think that Hilary has been emotionalized and even penalized for the fact that she is a woman, contrary to men. Candidates like Obama seem to be valued for their strength and ability to seem powerful; Clinton does not.

This form of sexism and stereotyping happens in other forms of media as well. For example, it was widely accepted and even applauded when Brett Favre cried at his retirement press conference. Contrarily, Clinton was made to seem weak when she cried at an event at the Yale Child Study Center in early February. In a country that is supposed to be advanced, we are still operating on gender stereotypes build solely by social constructs. In turn, we may be robbing ourselves of talented and intelligent people.

*Just a note: this is not a reflection of my political association, just my observations of the media!