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Legal Commentary

: Althouse

The NYT "public editor" Clark Hoyt concludes that Maureen Dowd "by assailing Clinton in gender-heavy terms in column after column, went over the top."

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"Went over the top" is a pretty mild criticism though, don't you think? Surely, a columnist can exaggerate for comic effect and lampoon public figures. "Over the top" is almost a compliment. So it was over the top? Was it over the line?

... Dowd?s columns about Clinton?s campaign were so loaded with language painting her as a 50-foot woman with a suffocating embrace, a conniving film noir dame and a victim dependent on her husband that they could easily have been listed in that Times article on sexism...

That Times article? That Times article? For crying out loud! Link!!! To be fair, if you scroll to the bottom of the page, under the heading "Past Coverage," you'll see "Critics and News Executives Split Over Sexism in Clinton Coverage" ? with the link I've carried over, and you can figure out that it's the same article referred to in the first paragraph of Hoyt's article. But dammit, Times, put links in the text as you refer to things.

Back to the subject at hand:

?I?ve been twisting gender stereotypes around for 24 years,? Dowd responded. She said nobody had objected to her use of similar images about men over seven presidential campaigns. She often refers to Barack Obama as ?Obambi? and has said he has a ?feminine? management style. But the relentless nature of her gender-laden assault on Clinton ? in 28 of 44 columns since Jan. 1 ? left many readers with the strong feeling that an impermissible line had been crossed, even though, as Dowd noted, she is a columnist who is paid not to be objective....
Politically correct is never a term one would apply to Dowd?s commentary. Her columns this year said Clinton?s ?message is unapologetically emasculating,? and that she ?needed to prove her masculinity? but in the end ?had to fend off calamity by playing the female victim.? In one column Dowd wrote, ?She may want to take a cue from the Miss America contest: make a graceful, magnanimous exit and wait in the wings.?
?From the time I began writing about politics,? Dowd said, ?I have always played with gender stereotypes and mined them and twisted them to force the reader to be conscious of how differently we view the sexes.? Now, she said, ?you are asking me to treat Hillary differently than I?ve treated the male candidates all these years, with kid gloves.?

Hoyt never says that Dowd went over the line, and I don't see that he's criticized her in any significant way. Nor should he! Her explanation of what she does and why it's right is dead on. Hoyt went through an appropriate "public editor" analysis in response to criticism, and he let it seem as though he was disapproving, and yet I don't see that he really was.

Have the balls to say she was right.

Full post as published by Althouse on June 22, 2008 (boomark / email).