Hillary Clinton in the News: Gender and Authenticity in American Politics by Shawn J. Parry-Giles (review)

When Hillary Clinton established her Twitter account on June 10, 2013, her inaugural tweet made a playful reference to Adam Smith and Stacy Lambe’s “Texts from Hillary” Tumblr meme: “Thanks for the inspiration @ASmith83 and @Sllambe—I’ll take it from here...#tweetsfromhillary.” The tweet and Clinton’s Twitter bio were lauded by pundits, including the “Texts from Hillary” author Smith. He told the Daily Beast that Clinton’s Twitter persona “really comes off as authentic.” Before 2013, Clinton had difficulty establishing a public persona that pundits and voters deemed authentic. In Hillary Clinton in the News: Gender and Authenticity in American Politics, Shawn J. Parry-Giles argues that this perceived inauthenticity can be attributed to news frames that coalesced during Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and remained remarkably consistent throughout Hillary Clinton’s public career, despite the varied roles she assumed between 1992 and 2008. Her book examines the ways in which this rhetoric of inauthenticity was fostered by both standard news practices and the press’s inability to accommodate the complexities of postmodern womanhood.

Parry-Giles takes as her object of study television news broadcasts, assessing the ways in which news frames constituted Hillary Clinton’s political persona. The book proceeds chronologically, assessing broadcast media coverage of Clinton from 1992 to 2001, and reflecting briefly on how news frames that developed during Clinton’s tenure as U.S. first lady and U.S. senator shaped media coverage of her bid for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Although Clinton’s primary titles during that time period were U.S. first lady and U.S. senator, Parry-Giles identifies six roles into which Clinton was cast by broadcast news media: campaign surrogate, legislative activist, legal defendant, international emissary, scorned wife, and political candidate. These roles correspond to “key moments in Clinton’s national political career,” which included “the 1992 presidential campaign, the health care debate, the Whitewater investigation, Clinton’s international travel as first lady, the Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky affair, Clinton’s campaign for the U.S. Senate seat from New York,...[and] her bid for the presidency” (18). Parry-Giles contends that this “wide-angle view of Clinton’s life in the news” presents “the evolution of news frames across multiple news organizations, a variety of controversial issues, and unprecedented changing political roles of one woman over the span of nearly two decades” (18).

Parry-Giles views political authenticity as a negotiated and contested process wherein politicians attempt to authenticate their image, opponents attempt to discredit it, and the news media act as “self-appointed arbiters” of the struggle (12). In the case of coverage of Hillary Clinton, however, this arbitration is heavily influenced by norms of authentic “womanhood” and “manhood” that produce gendered versions of civic republicanism and shape U.S. national identity writ large. Parry-Giles argues that by “framing Clinton early on as a more outspoken and out front feminist, the press and her opposition portrayed a woman with personality flaws—too cold, hard-edged, and unlikeable to serve as an admirable first lady or a viable elected official” (179). Parry-Giles concludes that because journalists deemed this “true personality” to be “at odds with traditional prescriptions of authentic womanhood,” it was easy to cast Clinton as “polarizing and unappealing” (179). The negative features of Clinton’s public identity “formed the foundation of her political authenticity (polarizing feminist and political activist) as well as her inauthenticity (dubious and opportunistic celebrity politician)” (179, emphasis in original).

That Hillary Clinton was treated ungenerously by the press and her political opponents has been chronicled by journalists and corroborated by scholars. What Parry-Giles’s book adds to this conversation is an exhaustive, systematic examination of broadcast news practices, assessing both their verbal and visual rhetoric. Of particular import is the work Parry-Giles does to trace the decontextualization and redeployment of...