Did Media Gender Bias Hurt Clinton in Iowa?

It’s no secret that Iowa is one of only two states to never have elected a woman to serve in Congress or as governor. The fact was repeatedly thrust in Iowans’ faces as they weighed the engorged field of presidential hopefuls throughout 2007. While no one has ever been able to pinpoint an exact reason why the Hawkeye State holds this particular title, one guess has been that Iowa press outlets, having little experience working with women running for high office, might be influencing public perception.

Did gender bias by Iowa members of the media play a role in New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s end result in the first-in-the-nation caucuses?

“I think if you go back to the time when Roxanne [Conlin] ran for governor in 1982, there were definitely news stories about her clothes, her makeup and her hair,” said Lt. Gov. Patty Judge, who formerly ran two successful statewide campaigns to serve as Iowa’s first female secretary of agriculture. “Even when Bonnie Campbell ran for governor this was the case. When that race ended, I remember Bonnie saying that she could finally put on a pair of jeans again without being criticized. For me, however, I think that I was treated fairly well by the media and I don’t recall a particular bias.”

More than a decade before Judge was elected to her first term as secretary of agriculture, Jo Ann Zimmerman was Iowa’s last independently elected lieutenant governor. She was the first woman to hold the position and only the second Democratic office holder in Iowa history to serve with a Republican governor (Terry Branstad). Zimmerman, who is credited with the first successful statewide campaign by an Iowa woman, also points five years before her election to the 1981 and 1982 bid of Roxanne Conlin for governor.

“I wasn’t treated by the press in the way that they treated Roxanne,” Zimmerman said. “I mean, they talked about her clothes and her hair all the time. The press didn’t do that so much with me. I think that was because [Roxanne] was the first woman from one of the major parties to run for governor. She made it through a primary and, well, they just didn’t know how to cover her. And, at that time, they were pretty much all male reporters. So, they discussed her hair and her clothes instead of the issues in the campaign.”

Zimmerman said she’d like to report that those biases had changed, but there are still times they creep into news coverage. She said that the media did “better” while reporting on Clinton during the recent Iowa caucuses.

“We still have some who will revert to looking at standards instead of at the person,” she said. “They forget exactly how they are stating something, so they state it from the male point of view. … That carries over and some people don’t even realize they are using bias.”

Zimmerman says she’s optimistic about change as more women join predominantly male newsrooms, but she doesn’t expect gender bias to just go away because women are helping to report.

“Even the women who are reporting now, they still key off of past statements that are more male-oriented,” she said. “But overall, I think the press did a better job of covering Hillary while she was in Iowa. I definitely feel that the state media has done a much better job than the national media.

“It’s difficult because I don’t think the media realizes they are writing from a bias because they’ve always heard and seen things in the same way. Are we ‘manning’ a desk or are we ‘staffing’ a desk? It’s the everyday thing. That’s what we face.”

Subtle or more open, Iowans might soon have a definitive answer to the question of whether the media perpetrated gender bias during the course of build-up to the Iowa caucuses. Dianne Bystrom, director of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University, is working on a study of Iowa and New Hampshire media that she anticipates publishing in late summer or early fall.

“Overall, if you are just looking at the Iowa media, I think they did a pretty fair job of covering the candidates that came through Iowa,” Bystrom said. “I would say it was actually a more fair job with less gender bias than what we see at the national level — primarily in television reporting.”

Bystrom said if she was to look for fault in media coverage, she would point to the final coverage on caucus night.

“Something that really struck me was the reporting of the results of the Democratic race compared to the reporting of the results of the Republican race,” she said. “When you looked at The Des Moines Register, they basically listed [former Arkansas Gov. Mike] Huckabee first, [former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt] Romney second and then [Arizona Sen. John] McCain and [former Tennessee Sen. Fred] Thompson in a tie for third. But if you actually went to the Republican Party site, you saw that either McCain or Thompson received several hundred more votes than the other. It wasn’t really a tie, yet it was reported as such.

“On the Democratic side, the media was reporting the horse race — [Illinois Sen. Barack] Obama first, [former North Carolina Sen. John] Edwards second and Clinton third. But, if you actually visited the Democratic Party’s site, you’d learn that Edwards had only .28 percent more of a delegate than Clinton did. Yes, the Iowa caucus really did elevate Obama’s campaign. But I also think it wounded the Clinton campaign. … Although I’m not sure that was because of gender. I’m not sure what caused it.”

While Bystrom agreed that the way the Iowa results were reported may have added to the boon the Clinton campaign received after winning New Hampshire, she said she still believes the reporting was disappointing and was a blow to the Clinton campaign.

“Iowa is a much tougher place for a woman to run than is the state of New Hampshire,” she said. “If you look at a comparison of women’s political participation in the two states it is really quite remarkable.”

Although Iowa currently has a record number of women serving in the state legislature, the state percentage is roughly average on a national scale. On the other hand, New Hampshire ranks second in the nation for the number of women serving in the state legislature. New Hampshire has also had a recent woman governor and has elected a woman to Congress.

“Women voters in New Hampshire see role models each and every day,” Bystrom said. “They see women in the governorship, in the state legislature and in Congress. They see women with political power. We don’t see that very often here in Iowa.”

Judge, who has been a woman with political power in Iowa, says that often the stress of a campaign might lead a candidate — male or female — to feel as if there is a media bias.

“I think when you are running for an office — particularly when you are in the heat of a campaign — if your opponent gets more ink than you do, you start to really believe that there is media bias against you or that the media is biased for your opponent,” Judge said. “I know that from personal experience because I’ve felt that. But I think that everything just gets over-exaggerated in your own mind and your staff’s minds because you are trying desperately to win.”

Judge also understands the importance of Iowa’s young women being exposed to positive political role models of their own gender. She’s optimistic that more good things are to come for women in Iowa politics.

“I think the press in Iowa truly understands and took very seriously the state’s role with the caucuses,” she said. “I think the press and Iowans really tried to take a level approach with the candidates. I’ve been interviewed many, many times about why I think we are where we are, and if there is some big gender bias within the state. I really do not believe there is. I believe that when the right woman decides to run today — now this would not be true for Roxanne and Bonnie because I think they really were pioneers — but when a woman runs today, in the climate we have today with Hillary Clinton being taken as a serious candidate, and does all the necessary background work and planning for that run, she will win. And I think that will be soon.”