Come On, New York Times
This is the picture that the New York Times ran with a story called “Ending Her Bid, Clinton Backs Obama.” There’s a different story up under that headline now (it’s currently first on the front page), and you’ll notice a different, far less spastic picture. This is the kind of shit that really makes me feel sorry for Hillary Clinton, because even if she did conduct her primary bid with the entitled, obtuse dementia one usual finds emanating from the White House, the news media has always gotten off on undermining her. They were never going to be fair to her, and she must believe that she went down not because Barack was a better candidate, but because assholes at places like the NYT liked him better. It’s the kind of petty schoolyard bullshit you can only call institutionalized misogyny.
And they just had to take one last potshot at her, running a shot of Clinton frozen in the kind of mid-word grimace we delete from our own digital cameras. This is the reason we don’t generally pause video of people while the speak, but the NYT chose this photo from the hundreds of photos Doug Mills must have taken that night, the one that makes Hillary look like the Joker. Michael Shaw has written about this tendency of the visual media to “do” Hillary like this, and even though I think Barack is the Second Coming, it makes me sick, and more than a little pissed. She was a powerful, well-meaning, popular candidate, and there’s no reason why anyone should try to make her look ugly.
I mean, Lord knows I’ve seen some unflattering images of Hillary Clinton, but shit.
Sat., Jun. 7, 2008
Reader Comments (1)
My thoughts exactly. The HuffPo perfected the art of the unflattering Hillary shot, too. I can only imagine what NYT's criteria for their Clinton pics are.
EDITOR: Hey boss, what do you want for the concession speech on the front page?
RICHARD J. MEISLIN: Give me something along the lines of Willem Dafoe sniffing the inside of his mom for the very first time.
EDITOR: This job is too easy.