About 2 weeks ago, Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin made a comment that the only difference between a hockey mom and a warthog is that a hockey mom wears lipstick. Fast forward two weeks to yesterday, and Barrack Obama makes a comment about the Republican party, joking that "You can put lipstick on a pig; it's still a pig". Although a seemingly innocent comment, the Republican party jumped on Obama's comment, calling it sexist and claiming it compares Palin to a pig.
This made me think of how news is usually told from one point of view, thererfore presenting a bias. On one side of the story, Obama made a sexist comment that was meant to demoralize Sarah Palin and the Republican campaign. If you take a look at the other narrative (in this case, both seem to be equally dominant), Obama used an everyday phrase that was misconstrued as a sexist remark. Either way you look at it, the Democratic campaign could be seriously damaged due to a simple choice of words (or not). Luckily, I found an interesting website that has a short post from both a democratic and republican author. Check it out here.
1 comment:
And I heard an NPR piece yesterday that included audio clips from other politicians who have used the "lipstick/pig" expression in the past, politicians from each of the country's dominant political parties.
Like some other posts from your classmates, this issue brings up the importance of context whenever we try to make meaning of a text (speech, comment, poem, video, novel). People critical of Obama might argue that his comment came too close to Governor Palin's comment about "lipstick" in her acceptance speech; therefore, he was being implicitly critical of her. Context is always critical, and we'll discuss it in greater detail with "Huck Finn" later this semester.
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