Below is an email from UltraViolet.org
(and if you watched Samantha Bee’s show recently, you may have seen her news clip montage about who’s considered “electable”)
You’ve probably heard that presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg speaks Norwegian–did you know that Kirsten Gillibrand speaks fluent Mandarin?
Vanity Fair gushed over how much Beto O’Rourke likes to read . . . but left out the 11 books Elizabeth Warren has written. Kamala Harris broke fundraising records when she announced her candidacy, but those numbers have been drowned out by coverage of Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden.1
Let’s be clear: There’s a blatantly sexist bias in the coverage of the 2020 race. If we don’t call it out now, it could be another generation before America elects a woman president.
UltraViolet Education Fund is calling on CNN, MSNBC, and other national news outlets to provide fair and equal coverage of the women running for president.
The statistics are clear–women candidates are being overlooked. Tracking of media mentions of presidential candidates shows that the men candidates are consistently covered more than the women by a wide margin. In one week, Pete Buttigieg was mentioned twice as often as Kamala Harris, and Bernie Sanders was mentioned three times more than Elizabeth Warren.2
And when women are covered in the national media, it’s much more likely to be in a negative light. Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand have never lost an election, while Beto O’Rourke is best known for losing to Sen. Ted Cruz, and Joe Biden has lost presidential bids in 1988 and 2008.3 But the media keeps discussing whether the women are electable.
Consider the headlines that have run about women candidates so far this year. As soon as she announced her campaign, the biggest story about Sen. Amy Klobuchar was about how she treats her staff. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s strong policy plans make her “boring.”4
We have women running for president who have national experience and solid policy plans–and the media keeps implying over and over again that they stand no chance against less-qualified men. Men candidates just get mentioned more often and are given more positive coverage.
Presidential candidates rely on media coverage to reach the nation, and this blatant sexism could cause a woman candidate to lose the election. We can’t let that happen.
–Shaunna, Kat, Karin, Holly, Kathy, Susan, Anathea, Emma, Pilar, Natalie, Melody, Lindsay, Pam, Ryan, Sonja, and Noma, the UltraViolet Action team
Sources:
1. Why Female Presidential Candidates Are Still Overlooked, Bazaar, April 18, 2019
2. Buttigieg Was The Second-Most-Mentioned Candidate On Cable Last Week. Sanders Was The First., FiveThirtyEight, April 15, 2019
3. Why Female Presidential Candidates Are Still Overlooked, Bazaar, April 18, 2019
4. The 2020 authenticity primary, Vox, March 25, 2019