{"id":13099,"date":"2007-10-03T14:20:16","date_gmt":"2007-10-03T18:20:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/13099.html"},"modified":"2007-10-03T14:20:16","modified_gmt":"2007-10-03T18:20:16","slug":"media-believes-clintons-chuckles-are-no-laughing-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/media-believes-clintons-chuckles-are-no-laughing-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"Media believes Clinton’s chuckles are no laughing matter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Following up an item<\/a> from the weekend, media scrutiny of Hillary Clinton’s marriage, hairstyle, clothing, and cleavage has apparently grown stale, leading reporters to turn their attention to the Democratic frontrunner’s laugh. The New York Times has labeled it “The Cackle<\/a>” — and yes, the paper of record really did capitalize it.<\/p>\n

Perhaps not surprisingly, it led the WaPo’s Howard Kurtz<\/a> to offer a classic example of detached media analysis — he’s not writing about Clinton’s laugh, he’s writing about the media’s interest in Clinton’s laugh.<\/p>\n

Forget the cleavage. It’s now about the cackle. No joke: Hillary Clinton’s laugh is now being analyzed, scrutinized and, yes, mocked as if it were a sound barrier on her glide path to the Democratic presidential nomination: Is it real? Is it fake? Is it a diabolically clever attempt to portray her as a human being?<\/p>\n

What a hoot.<\/p>\n

Jon Stewart, setting the pace for political journalism, kicked things off last week by assembling a grab bag of giggling and guffawing when the senator appeared on all five Sunday talk shows, from a barn outside her Chappaqua, N.Y., home. As Clinton was seen bursting into belly laughs– sometimes oddly and abruptly — at queries by the likes of Bob Schieffer and Chris Wallace, the “Daily Show” host likened her to a robot switching into chuckle mode when aggressive interrogators needed to be neutralized.<\/p>\n

Suddenly, everyone wanted a piece of the punch line, examining whether The Laugh met some vaguely defined standard of acceptability.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Apparently, much to the detriment of our political discourse, the powers that be have decided that there are no standards of acceptability<\/em>.
\n
\nKurtz’s piece added, “[E]xamining her personality quirks is more fun than deconstructing her stance on Iraq.”<\/p>\n

It initially struck me as a cheap shot — it wouldn’t be Kurtz’s first<\/a> — but Greg Sargent argues<\/a> that it was actually a helpful admission.<\/p>\n

In a sense we should be thanking Kurtz here. He’s done us a public service by laying bare the media’s frivolity in all its inane glory. According to Kurtz, many of his colleagues are obsessing over The Laugh because examining Hillary’s personality is “more fun” than examining her Iraq stance, and they’ve all “collectively decided” that Hillary is the inevitable Dem nominee and is all but certain to be our next President. Isn’t that lovely?<\/p>\n

I understand that Kurtz was taking a gently ironic poke at his media colleagues. Still, I’d genuinely like to know what Kurtz, a media expert, actually thinks of all this. Should coverage be dictated by the fact that her laugh is a more “fun” topic than Iraq, or by the media’s collective decision that Hillary “is the inevitable nominee”? Should media folks make such a decision at all? Isn’t all this inanity kind of a bad thing?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Kurtz plays it safe, merely reporting on the reporting, but I feel comfortable taking a firm position against<\/i> the inanity.<\/p>\n

Update: Hillary Clinton ended a brief appearance before the American Federation of Teachers today by saying<\/a>, “I don’t want to go on too much longer because it might cause me to laugh, and then heaven knows what we’d be hearing about for the next week or two. You’ve gotta have a sense of humor in this business.”<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Following up an item from the weekend, media scrutiny of Hillary Clinton’s marriage, hairstyle, clothing, and cleavage has apparently grown stale, leading reporters to turn their attention to the Democratic frontrunner’s laugh. The New York Times has labeled it “The Cackle” — and yes, the paper of record really did capitalize it. Perhaps not surprisingly, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13099"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13099\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}