Hillary Clinton: Right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch says he could live with her as president.
The average American would perhaps be forgiven for thinking that the 2016 presidential election was already underway—that the Democratic Party, at least, had held its primaries and chosen its candidate: Hillary Clinton.
Despite the fact that Clinton has, at press time, yet to declare that she is running for any office, most of the media treats her candidacy—and frontrunner status—as a foregone conclusion. Despite the fact that at present, she holds no elected or appointed office, having left her post as secretary of State on February 1, 2013, her every move is followed intently by the press.
Between September 10 and September 17, 2014, for example, CNN.com ran articles headlined “Hillary Clinton Returns to Iowa; So Is This a Fresh Start or Deja Vu?” (9/15/14), “Bernie Sanders Challenges Hillary Clinton: ‘Is [She] Going to Say That?’” (9/10/14) and “Iowa Democrats to Hillary Clinton: Slam the Door in Iowa, Win the Nomination” (9/17/14), among others. Video titles included “Hillary Clinton, Madam President?” (9/12/14) and “Clinton Acknowledges What We All Knew” (9/15/14).
A Nexis search for news articles with “Hillary Clinton” in the headline between August 17 and September 17 turned up 1,383 results. Major newspapers in that month had 20 headlines about Clinton.
For comparison, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), another female politician with a recent book who is rumored to be a future presidential contender, appeared in two headlines in major newspapers in that same time period, and 210 headlines in all news sources. Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate minority leader facing a tight race for re-election this November, appeared in just four headlines over that month in major newspapers, and 208 headlines across all news sources collected by Nexis.
President Barack Obama just barely got more press than Clinton, managing only 1,461 headlines, despite giving major speeches about the economy and foreign policy in that time.
It’s not just the corporate press that’s in on the Clinton fest, either. Even award-winning nonprofit progressive magazine Mother Jones has an entire Hillary Clinton vertical on its website, alongside its verticals for “Dark Money,” “Iraq,” “China,” “Race and Ethnicity” and “Tech.” No other politician, not even the president, has one.
What’s with the obsession? Why do we care what Hillary Clinton thinks of the Washington football team’s name (FusionTV, 7/29/14) or the situation in Ferguson, Missouri (Washington Post, 8/29/14), or ISIS (New York Daily News, 9/10/14)?
Perhaps ISIS is understandable—she was, after all, the secretary of State not that long ago. But as for the rest, it seems as though many news outlets want Clinton to act not just like a candidate for office, but, as Megan Carpentier at the Guardian (8/27/14) pointed out, like “the current president of the United States.”
We’ve got a long way to go before that might come to pass, though, and the media’s treatment of Clinton as the inevitable winner does a disservice to current issues, to the candidates for office in the more immediate 2014 midterm elections, and most of all, to voters who, at some point two years in the future, want to have more options from which to choose for the presidency.
In 1968, Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw, two communications scholars, studied the presidential election through the news media in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, comparing the issues given prominence in a combination of local and national media with the issues regarded as important by the voters who used that media to inform themselves. They found that the public’s opinion of what mattered mirrored the press’s ranking almost exactly, and coined the term agenda-setting to describe what happened there.
In the years since, McCombs writes in the 2005 Oxford anthology The Press, hundreds of empirical studies have confirmed the agenda-setting ability of the media. They have also found evidence that “the press is not only frequently successful in telling us what to think about, the press also is frequently successful in telling us how to think about it.”
This is not to argue that the media brainwash all who consume them, injecting us with opinions that we parrot without thinking. However, it is worth noting that the more often a particular issue or person is in the news, the more likely the public is to form an opinion about that person—positive or negative. When a person like Clinton is repeatedly portrayed as a candidate for an office, indeed the frontrunner, we are pushed to believe that this is the case, whether we like it or not.
New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen has written extensively about what he considers a defining feature of today’s pundit-heavy political media: the worship of savviness. “In politics, our journalists believe, it is better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts,” he wrote in 2011 (PressThink, 8/26/11). “Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be. (And to be unsavvy is far worse than being wrong.)”
A perfect example of such savvy coverage is the Washington Post’s The Fix blog. Nia-Malika Henderson (9/19/14) takes an actual occurrence—Clinton giving a speech at a Democratic Party event in support of women candidates in this year’s midterm elections—and spins it into an analysis of Clinton’s future presidential campaign. Clinton’s speech, Henderson writes, is significant not just for the candidates who are actually running in tight races for election this year, “but for what it reveals about what might be a key argument for a Clinton presidency when (oops, if) she runs in 2016.”
That cute “oops, if” functions as a wink to the reader, who is assumed to be in on the joke. We all know Clinton is inevitable (despite the fact that she hasn’t declared anything), so we might as well skip right over the races happening this year to analyze what might happen two years from now.
Far from a declaration of political bias, savviness goes hand in hand with the pretense of objectivity. If all the in-the-know political watchers just know Clinton is going to run for office and continue to call her the frontrunner, then it’s just a fact that journalists can report on. When called on it, they point to other stories from other supposedly objective outlets, and to polls that show Clinton in the lead.
But as Thomas Patterson, who studies government and the press at Harvard, pointed out in his book Out of Order, poll stories are “entirely manufactured” by the press: It puts the items on the agenda, pays the pollster, asks the questions and then reports on the answers.
Covering the horse race of political campaigns is easy, Rosen noted, because it allows reporters and pundits to remain “objective” and to avoid talking about anything sticky, like real issues.
It is real issues that are kept out of the news—and out of the electoral process itself—when well-heeled centrist politicians like Clinton are fetishized by the savvy press. Clinton is a favorite of Wall Street, widely seen as more hawkish than Obama, and unlikely to demand change to the status quo (Huffington Post, 6/24/14).
As long as the media continue to laugh off Vermont independent Bernie Sanders, we won’t hear much about whether single-payer healthcare would be preferable to the patchwork that exists under the Affordable Care Act. As long as Elizabeth Warren gets one headline for every ten about Clinton, we won’t hear about breaking up the Wall Street banks. And that’s just fine with the corporate media. It allows them to stay in power.
Even right-wing Fox News honcho Rupert Murdoch, who financially backed Clinton’s Senate campaigns, says he could “live with Hillary” as president (Fortune, 4/10/14).
Nichols and McChesney: The ad dollars that flow from political candidates are a cash bonanza for broadcast outlets.
The continued production of substance-free political speculation comes at a cost to our democracy; in his book The Vanishing Voter, Patterson traces the steady decline in US voter turnout to, among other things, the endless drone of campaign coverage. As John Nichols and Robert McChesney point out in their 2013 book Dollarocracy, countries that have shorter, well-defined campaign cycles also have higher voter turnout.
But media companies, Nichols and McChesney explain, have a particular incentive to keep the campaign coverage flowing. The ad dollars that flow from political candidates—and, now more than ever, from “independent” groups—are a cash bonanza for broadcast outlets. Meanwhile, the ongoing financial crisis in journalism has meant layoffs for thousands of enterprise journalists—while political analysis and punditry are cheap.
Money, too, helps decide which politicians the media will take seriously. Though Hillary Clinton hasn’t had to disclose her net worth since she left public office, we know that her name still rakes in the dollars—the Ready for Hillary Super PAC, which is not legally allowed to coordinate with the (as yet undeclared, remember) candidate, revealed in July of this year that it had raised $2.5 million in the past three months (Bloomberg, 7/15/14). When it comes to money, anyway, Clinton is serious business.
But money, we should remember, isn’t everything. Just this summer, Fordham law professor Zephyr Teachout mounted a significant primary challenge to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in two months with around $200,000 in funds. (The governor had upwards of $35 million.) While she didn’t win, her 34 percent of the statewide vote should have been a sharp rebuke to all the pundits who shrugged her off as hopeless.
There may be candidates out there right now considering a run for the presidency who have brilliant ideas we have yet to hear, who could motivate the grassroots, whose ideas would challenge the wealthy and powerful who, poll after poll shows, Americans think have too much control over our politics. When they are told, over and over, in the pages of major newspapers and on broadcast and cable news and even public radio (NPR, 9/15/14) that one candidate is inevitable, that she is the far-ahead front-runner, will they decide not even to run?
We should ask who benefits from the endless coverage of Hillary Clinton’s every move and word. It is most certainly not our democracy.
Sarah Jaffe is a staff writer at In These Times and the co-host of Dissent magazine’s Belabored podcast.
