CHALLENGING SEXIST LANGUAGE: AN OPEN LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES

We are an organization of thousands of women who enthusiastically support Secretary Hillary Clinton for president. Our members know very well her qualifications, experience, hard work, policies, concern for issues important to all Americans, trustworthiness, kindness, and graciousness.

That is why we were appalled to read a story published in the digital edition of The New York Times on Monday, originally titled Presidential Candidates Gear Up for a Busy Labor Day, in which reporter Ashley Parker referred to Secretary Clinton as a “politician’s-wife-turned-politician-herself” who spent the summer “hobnobbing…with celebrities.” In two demeaning, sexist sentences, The Times dismissed Secretary Clinton’s extraordinary accomplishments, including her Yale law degree, the decades she spent working for the poor and underprivileged, her eight years as a senator from New York, and her four years as secretary of state (in addition to her eight years as first lady).

By attempting to delegitimize the secretary or depict her as a frivolous party-hopper, The Times has done the candidate a grave disservice. Secretary Clinton is a hardworking candidate who has been campaigning, honing policy, and doing voter outreach for more than a year. That she spent some of August undertaking traditional fundraising, as have her predecessors, is not surprising given the requirements of running a campaign. We would venture to guess, however, that if the Clinton campaign were cash poor, The Times would be the first to point a finger of doom.

And while the wording of the article, and the bias it revealed, angered us, the surreptitious editing that followed—perhaps in response to tweets and emails—without any mea culpa from the editors, only exacerbated the problem. As this NewsDiffs log of the various incarnations of the story shows, the original version, posted before 9:00 am, remained on nytimes.com virtually untouched for eight and a half hours. Most readers internalized that story, flaws and all. It wasn’t until after 5:00 pm that the online post was significantly revised—without a time stamp or editor’s note of explanation—now calling Secretary Clinton a “veteran politician” but leaving the “hobnobbing” comment intact. The current live draft, released after midnight, became the above-the-fold lead story in Tuesday’s print edition. The “hobnobbing” characterization was gone, but the writer could not resist a snarky assertion that Secretary Clinton “made nice with the news media” on her airplane yesterday, as if she somehow owed them something...more