After Hillary Clinton teared up in early January during the 2008 presidential race, the incident generated vast amounts of media coverage — about 500 stories.
Less than a month earlier, however, candidate Mitt Romney had also teared up. That incident generated 14 stories.
The situations were similar. Both Romney and Clinton were answering questions. In both cases, their voices quivered and their eyes teared up, but they didn’t cry. So why would Clinton’s tears be so much more newsworthy?
Was the discrepancy because Clinton was an election front-runner? A Democrat? A woman?
Erika Falk, the head of the master’s in communications program at Johns Hopkins University and author of Women For President: Media Bias in Eight Campaigns, would no doubt attribute it to Clinton’s gender. And armed with data from her book, I think she could make a very strong case to its truth.
