Graduation Year

Spring 2014

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Department

Politics and International Relations

Reader 1

Michael Thurman

Reader 2

Jennifer Merolla

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2014 Jessica Gonchar

Abstract

Hillary Clinton faced gendered discrimination by news media sources during her presidential campaign in 2008. However, there is almost no research concerning the ways Clinton was portrayed on political blogs. Because blogs typically attract consumers who have similar ideologies, this paper explores if Clinton faced more gender bias on conservative blogs than liberal blogs, utilizing two well-established political blogs. Specifically it looks at three biases that exist in traditional sources of news media: appearance-based discrimination, an emphasis on domesticity, and analyses of femininity. This paper found that, in general, bloggers on a conservative website presented more instances of gender bias and bloggers on the liberal website presented fewer. The analysis indicates that while gendered stereotypes existed throughout the blogosphere during the Democratic Primaries, they were more pronounced on conservative websites.

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