Senator Hillary Clinton seems to have a very interesting outlook on her run for the presidential nomination.  Facing ultimate defeat as Senator Obama passed the 2,118 delegate mark necessary to win the Democratic Party’s nomination, she did not concede in last night’s speech.  She said, “I want the nearly 18 million people who voted for me to be respected and heard.”

Now, and as early as October, Clinton supporters are blaming “media sabotage” for the frontrunner’s downfall.  They sight examples of sighting pledged delegates for Obama on the news without showing Clinton’s increase in delegates, and they also sight how the media threw softballs at Obama while they threw curveballs to Clinton in debates.

Bill Clinton took up this war cry after the October 30 debate.  According toJackie Calmes of the Wall Street Journal:

“Sen. Clinton, usually the debate standout, bobbled a question on drivers licenses for illegal immigrants and endured days of criticism. When Democrats debated two weeks later, Sen. Obama fumbled the same issue. Little was made of it.”

“’That's when Bill Clinton just lost it,’ says an adviser. Associates say he called to vent: ‘They torture her on this drivers license issue for weeks, and then the media gives this guy a free ride?’ After Thanksgiving, the Clintons brought aides to their Washington home, and he told them: "If the media is not going to take this guy on, then we have to."

But is this really a valid point to make?  The media criticizes every politician at different levels.  Would they really make a pattern of criticizing Clinton more than her opponents, or are her supporters just whining?

According to an analysis by S. Parry-Giles in the Critical Studies in Communication Journal, the media do show signs of bias against Clinton.  For example, television coverage in 1999 sometimes implicitly warned viewers of the danger of women who “become so powerful that they lose their femininity” (p. 208).  When Clinton struck back at vicious political comments in her first race for the Senate, her male opponent, Rick Lazio, labeled her “unwomanly”.  

The analysis also shows that if you look at Clinton’s television coverage as first lady, reporters used expressions such as “political weapon,” “high-octane Hillary,” “political animal,” “power monger,” and the “boss’s wife from hell” to describe her persona (p. 207).  These images remained in the eyes of viewers and voters as the media repeated these illustrations. “Overall, such images remain more negative than positive.  While the journalists acknowledge her educational and career successes, fear and skepticism pervade Clinton’s stories” (p. 209).  

It will be interesting to see if analyses of this presidential race show a continuance of this pattern.  But recent coverage might actually be following the pattern shown during her years before her 17-month-long campaign.

Today, despite many news outlets talk of Clinton’s potential aspirations to be the Democrat’s vice presidential candidate, some news outlets are already counting her out of that race.  AUSA Today article by Fredreka Schouten and Martha T. Moore notes:

“’If Clinton were to plunge back into the Senate, she could emerge as a powerhouse in the tradition of Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy,” said Donald Ritchie, the Senate's associate historian. After his 1980 loss to Jimmy Carter, Kennedy quickly established a reputation for bipartisanship that elevated his stature as a legislator.

‘Some senators do discover that there is life after a presidential campaign,’ Ritchie said.”

When all Democrats realize that yesterday’s events crowned Obama as their presidential candidate, the media will have plenty of time to criticize Senator Obama and Senator McCain.  But only time will reveal information on whether the media’s criticisms were equal to their criticism of Clinton.