Since first appearing on the national political scene in the early 1990s, Hillary Clinton has often served as a sort of Rorschach test regarding gender and American politics. Whether in her role as First Lady, U.S. Senator, Secretary of State, or presidential candidate, opinions of Clinton among voters run the gamut of extremes from idolatry to loathing. So too has media coverage of Clinton for the past quarter century; she has at times benefitted from name recognition, star power, and a narrative of inevitability regarding her presidential campaigns, yet she has also been subjected to sexist personal attacks that male politicians do not experience. Recurring themes about Clinton’s honesty, trustworthiness, and authenticity have plagued Clinton in media coverage and public opinion polls during her second run for the presidency in 2016. More Americans view her negatively than positively, which often leaves many in the news media wondering if, despite what then-candidate Barack Obama proclaimed in January 2008, Clinton really is “likable enough” to win the White House?

In this book, Shawn J. Parry-Giles examines the role that media frames play in creating both a “news biography” as well as a means to evaluating a politician’s “authenticity.” The latter is derived from “character concerns as candidates (and their surrogates) attempt to authenticate a candidate’s image as their political opponents, in turn, attempt to inauthenticate it” (p. 11). Parry-Giles considers the various media frames provided to describe Clinton’s many roles in public life since 1992. She finds that broadcast news coverage categorized Clinton into six roles—campaign surrogate, legislative activist, legal defendant, international emissary, scorned wife, and political candidate—during media-intensive periods of her political career, including her husband’s presidential campaigns, efforts at health care reform, the Whitewater investigation, diplomatic travel, the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, and her own political campaigns.

In addition, a news-framing pattern of Clinton developed during the 1992 presidential campaign and the early years of the Bill Clinton administration that have recurred throughout Clinton’s political career, which “functioned as rhetorics of constraint, which contributed to the disciplining of Hillary Clinton for her gendered spatial violations of political protocol” (p. 18). Parry-Giles also argues that a “common pattern of empowerment followed by retribution and silencing ultimately reflected a cycle of domestic violence involving the rhetorical disciplining of a woman framed as an unruly feminist” (p. 19). She concludes that news coverage of Clinton from 1992 through 2008 reinforced the idea that politics remains a male-dominated arena where men are legitimate and authentic actors while women are not (p. 197). In addition, she reports several implications from this news coverage, including the fact that news frames “can rely on a rhetoric of violence in targeting political women that reflect the traces of domestic violence and rape and the lingering fears over feminism” and “can function as rhetorics of deterrence and constraint for political women” (p. 178).

Parry-Giles is to be commended for her extensive analysis of television news coverage during Clinton’s tenure as first lady and her 2000 campaign for the U.S. Senate, which includes more than 1,200 major network and select cable news broadcasts. Her descriptive, qualitative analysis provides a richness of detail that explains much about the many complexities of how Clinton was portrayed by news coverage. However, from a methodological standpoint, important details regarding research design are omitted, including the rationale used for selecting news stories to analyze. This leaves the reader wondering the level of rigor attached to the data collection—for example, is this a random and representative sample or one that is focused subjectively and predominantly on negative stories/news frames of Clinton?

Other limitations to the study can be found in the lack of substantive discussions of relevant topics, particularly the extensive scholarly literature on framing (most notably the work done by political scientists and communication scholars), as well as the function of news (what dominates television news coverage in an industry driven by profit?). The former would help explain the extent to which news frames can matter, while the latter would do much to place the examples of television news stories within the proper context of the media environment. For example, noting that “the news media play fast and loose with the video contained in their vaults” (p. 93) is not revelatory for those of us who study the news media, but explaining why this is the case beyond just stories about Clinton would strengthen the argument about how and why frames matter, both positively and negatively, particularly within a gendered context.

At its core, this book is a feminist critique of Clinton’s television news coverage, and is described by Parry-Giles as a “feminist study designed to hasten the demise of ‘sexism’” (p. 200, n11). While a laudable goal, that statement encapsulates both the strength and weakness of this study—a strength because the book contributes to the much-needed discussion and study of gendered language within politics, but a weakness in that it does not provide empirical evidence to suggest a real-world consequence from such news framing. Scholars have long since assumed that news coverage of politicians plays a role in public opinion and perception, though a definitive cause-and-effect has yet to be discovered. If voters “like” one politician more than another, is news coverage solely to blame? As with many prominent public figures, Clinton’s relationship with the news media has always been complicated, due in large part to the contradictory nature of her time in public life and the inability of many in the news media to reconcile those contradictions—the traditional role of a First Lady versus an independent political spouse capable of contributing to policymaking and developing her own political ambitions.

The important link for political scientists in this type of study is whether media framing effects exist beyond a voter’s perception and image of a politician. If news coverage relies on sexist frames that somehow punish women politicians for being associated with feminism, does this effect voter behavior and/or turnout? While it is not difficult to find examples of media coverage of women politicians that is sexist, or certainly the larger issue of objectification of women throughout the mass media, there is also coverage in all mediums that is positive, or at least neutral, regarding women in politics. There is also no direct evidence to suggest that women candidates fail to win elected office, or that women legislators are less successful in introducing and passing legislation, because some news coverage may focus on trivial matters such as clothing and hairstyles, or worse, rely on sexist or even misogynistic language. Readers may also remain unconvinced that news frames of domestic violence and rape within Clinton’s coverage existed, as that finding is open to interpretation. While this conclusion fits nicely within feminist discourse, it does not advance our knowledge of the consequences of negative media framing. In the end, as a narrative-driven analysis, this book raises many important questions, but provides few definitive answers about the effects of framing beyond the fact that negative news frames about Clinton have existed throughout her time in public life.