* PUBLIC POST *

Excerpts only, as it is a somewhat long article. This captures the spirit; the full text contains more examples and background.

MSNBC’s Sexist Hypocrisy: Open Season on Conservative Women

In America, only liberal women enjoy protection from public degradation and disgusting characterizations.

By Jeff Poor and Colleen Raezler
Culture and Media Institute
April 15, 2009

On February 7, 2008, MSNBC’s David Shuster claimed Chelsea Clinton was being “pimped out” by her mother Hillary Clinton’s, presidential campaign.

Retribution quickly followed. News broke the very next day that Shuster’s comments had earned him a two-week suspension. The National Organization for Women (NOW) quickly issued a statement that called on NBC to “skip the sexism and report the news.” And while NOW praised NBC for its “swift and decisive action” against Shuster, the group also pointed out “a pattern at MSNBC: insult, apology, insult, apology.”

Yet, just over a year later, the network and NOW are hewing to a very different standard when it comes to women on the right. MSNBC personalities refer to a Republican congresswoman as a “Mata Hari,” and call a former female Republican vice-presidential nominee a “mail order bride” and characterize her as a dragon and a dog, and there’s no apology and no outrage.

For conservative women, it appears the strategy at MSNBC is “insult, insult, insult.”
...

Since the fall of last year, “Hardball” host Chris Matthews has made it a mission to hone in on Bachmann, one of 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, beginning with an aggressive line of questioning when she called some liberalism, including that coming from Obama associates William Ayers and Rev. Jeremiah Wright, “anti-American.”

On his March 27 show, he questioned her desire to protect the United States dollar and referred to her as “the Mata Hari of Minnesota” for her efforts in the House to statutorily defend the U.S. Dollar.

“It’s not clear why she did it since nobody on the planet, least of all here in America is talking about switching to some new multinational currency here,” Matthews said.
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The liberal media’s disdain for conservative women has a long and varied history, from Florida’s Katharine Harris, who was called “Cruella De Vil,” to the hated Ann Coulter to the “blond and witchy” Elisabeth Hasselbeck.

But no woman has drawn liberal ire like former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, and nobody has attacked Palin with the vitriol of MSNBC.

Starting with its coverage of the Republican National Convention in August, Matthews and several of the other on-air NBC News talent that appeared on MSNBC’s special coverage – including former “Nightly News” host Tom Brokaw and NBC correspondents Chuck Todd and Andrea Mitchell -- immediately keyed in on the pro-life candidate’s stance on abortion.
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After Palin spoke out against the character assassination the media carried out against her, Olbermann joked on January 13, 2009, “What’s the difference between a governor of Alaska and a pitbull? You can train a pitbull to occasionally keep its mouth closed.”

As for NOW, they issued no statements on the treatment Palin and Bachmann received from MSNBC during the 2008 general election cycle except to say of Palin, that her nomination was “a cynical effort to appeal to disappointed Hillary Clinton voters and get them to vote, ultimately, against their own self-interest.”
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Colleen Holmes, executive director of the conservative Eagle Forum told CMI, “Michelle Malkin summarized it perfectly when she noted that the liberals have a tendency to infantilize, sexualize, demonize and dehumanize conservative women. It’s astounding how intolerant liberals are of jokes about liberal women, and yet they’ll say, or at least tolerate the most bawdy, degrading and patronizing things about conservative women.”

Full article at: http://www.cultureandmediainstitute.org/articles/2009/20090415134622.asp...