Following her appearance on all five Sunday political talk shows on September 23 -- NBC's Meet the Press, CBS' Face the Nation, ABC's This Week, Fox News Sunday and CNN's Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer -- political reporters and other media personalities have seized on Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's (D-NY) laugh as a new subject of attention. In his October 2 column -- headlined "Chucklegate" -- Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz contended that "Jon Stewart is now setting the agenda for presidential campaign coverage," suggesting that the media flap over Clinton's laughter began with a September 25 segment on Comedy Central's The Daily Show. Similarly, Kurtz stated in his column in the October 3 print edition of The Washington Post that "Jon Stewart, setting the pace for political journalism, kicked things off last week by assembling a grab bag of giggling and guffawing when the senator appeared on all five Sunday talk shows." In fact, before the Daily Show segment aired, audio and video clips of Clinton's laughter had already been highlighted by the Republican National Committee, the Drudge Report, and the radio shows of conservatives Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, as well as such cable news programs as MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews and Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor.
Starting with reports in The New York Times and the Politico, and progressing to many other outlets, commentators speculated about whether Clinton's laughter is evidence of her "calculating" nature, with some characterizing her laugh as a "cackle" -- defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as "the sound made by a hen after laying an egg."
Occasional comments about Clinton's laughter did appear in the media prior to September 23, but not with the frequency and intensity present since Clinton's Sunday show appearances. For example, following Clinton's comment at a January 28 campaign stop in Iowa -- "
hat, in my background, equips me to deal with evil and bad men?" -- U.S. News & World Report's Paul Bedard wrote in his February 4 "Washington Whispers" column that "many didn't believe her aides who claimed it proved she's a jokester." Bedard added: "Well, as they say in Missouri, show me. Let's start with her laugh. 'People think that big belly laugh of hers is not real, but it is,' pleads a friend. 'She has a deep laugh that just makes you cackle.' And apparently, it's heard often by staff." Additionally, following the "Democratic Candidate Mashup" online debate co-hosted by Yahoo!, The Huffington Post, and Slate in early September, Rush Limbaugh highlighted what he called Clinton's "cackle" from the debate on the September 13 edition of his show, and a clip from the debate was posted on YouTube on September 16 with the headline, "Cackling Hillary Clinton."
Some journalists have criticized this latest media focus, which follows the media's earlier fixation on Clinton's neckline, as Media Matters for America documented (here, here, here, here, and here). Their criticism is included as part of a timeline of the coverage set out below:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200710040003?f=h_latest
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