Kaufer

The image bite
336
the media images are susceptible to continuous decontextualization
and re-contextualizaüon. Drawing from theories of feminist
critical discourse analysis and gender performance as well as scholarship on the
public/private divide, we examine the commentary of one U.S. television news
organization's (NBC) re-contextualization of the same stock footage of Hillary
Clinton over 10 newscasts spanning 20 months from August 1998 to June of
2000.

337
"the remaining 9 broadcasts feature decontextualized
visual imagery extracted from the memorial service and then recontextualized
over a twenty month interval to contribute to stories about Hillary Clinton's
response to the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, her support of Bill Clinton during the
impeachment process, and her bid for a U.S. Senate seat (Parry-Giles 2000)."

"As one can see from Appendix 2, NBC recirculated or rebroadcast most frequently
(RC/RB score = 9) a zoomed-in facial profile of Hillary Clinton from the
memorial service."

338
"We show
that through much of its coverage NBC reifies the public/private divide in traditional
masculine terms, and reports poUing data that re-enforces similar dominant
interpretations. Nonetheless, during the period of her Senate run, the network also
attempts to depict Hillary Clinton as an agent troubling masculine stereotypes and,
in so doing, exercises its own agency to trouble them as well. Such challenges to
rigid binaries support what Holmes (2005,56) refers to as the "chipping away at the
parameters of what is considered acceptable behaviour" for women."

" This question assumes that the American viewers of these image bites could
share at least a tacit awareness of the public/private divide as reflected in the language
and images of the newscasts. To test this deeper assumption, we applied to
the news transcripts a lexical cohesion algorithm developed by Beigman Klebanov
et al. (2008), which extracts every word pair from a transcript of interest and measures
the associative strength (called lexical cohesion) of the pair in terms of their
occurrence in dictionaries (Miller 1990), in large corpora of texts (Deerwester et
al. 1990) and in word association databases compiled over hundreds of English
speakers in the U.S. (Nelson et al. 2004) and the U.K. (Kiss et al. 1973).

"Running
the 10 transcripts of the broadcasts through Beigman-Klebanov's algorithm, we
discovered two large non-interactive clusters of words; one cluster was centered on
"politics" (a public term) and the second on "marriage" (a private term).

339
"In the time period of the transcripts we analyzed, Clinton required a diverse
repertoire of performative strategies to jump in such a short time frame from her
role as a first lady and victim of adultery, to a counselor for her husband facing
impeachment, to a candidate for elective office. In response, NBC tracked the
changing accounts of Clinton's decision-making in changing institutional contexts
through the use of unchanging images." That is fascinating.

 "From Walsh (2001) we take the idea that
women burdened by dominant masculine framings are relegated to private aspects
of the public sphere. Gal (2002, 80ff) extends Walsh's conception of the private
within the public by explaining the capacity of language to redraw public/private
boundaries through "fractal" recalibration, which allows the boundary, like cell
division, infinitely to subdivide (see also Gal 1991, Gal and Kligman 2000). Public
spaces can spawn private ones and private spaces can spawn public ones."
 home - living room - whispers

"The (re)calibrations of the public/
private divide occur implicitly and with lightening speed making them "difficult
to discuss explicitly" and hard to contemplate (Gal 2002, 85). Why then does the
divide often seem so fixed and brittle? According to Gal, we tend to imagine the
pubhc/private divide within stereotypical binaries to secure our orientation in the
language with others. This oscillating attention on the binary as an unstable creative
construct of an individual agent or as a stable construct habituated by social
practice, accounts for the historical resilience of the distinction as well as its fluid
cognitive-linguistic instability.

340
"we cannot simply see NBC as a media giant regulating Clinton to a
privatized public sphere (though its coverage at times does exactly that). Rather,
we need to see NBC as doing its best to "make sense" of one woman's negotiation
of public/private spaces as she takes on ever new identities across a complex political
terrain. NBC's reliance on a stable set of 8 image bites of Hillary Clinton with
updated meanings provided an efficient way for the network to try to keep pace
with the many identity shifts that Clinton makes.

using her skills to save the presidency

341
"The words and images paint Clinton as the cold calculating professional able to help
a husband who is too emotionally broken to help himself. As Mitchell concludes the
story, however, a new private space opens from within the public space of a counselor
at arm's length from her client. This is not described as a marital reconciliation
(vdth the private space in control) but more as a distant professional relationship
where the ice has broken and professional competence blossoms into personal trust:
(4) And friends say because the Clintons are now each other's best council, if
anything, this crisis has brought them closer together."

342
 crying - decontextualized

"Whether MitcheU's choice or a producer's,
the profile image helps authenticate Mitchell's claim of Hillary's "public humiliation
and private pain."
Voice-over 5 contributes to a highly masculinized image bite of Hulary as a
woman scorned. But both the voice-over and the accompanying imagery change
dramatically. An image of BiU Clinton is shown walking from behind the presidential
limo with a frown on his face appropriate for a memorial service. The
frown is sustained for 9 seconds until he gets into the car. Yet, as he maintains this
frown, Mitchell now states:
(6) NBC News [has learned] she helped her husband prepare first to admit to
adultery to Ken Starr, the man they both view as a mortal enemy."

343
"The intonation of "How does she do it?" suggests incredulity as
well as admiration, as if to open a space to reflect on Hillary's ability to battle so
many public and private fronts at once.
The same broadcast contains more traditional redrawings of Hillary as a longsuffering
yet loyal wife. The redrawing is done by Jesse Jackson (political activist
and religious leader) who enters the newscast on screen with a character testimonial,
affirming the private Hillary's "unconditional love" for Bill and her understanding
that he is "not perfect.""

" Yet, it is our contention that NBC required all these constructions
to do full justice to the multiple and interdependent identities that Hillary
Clinton exhibited across the time frame of our analysis."
344
 private/ public
"marital relationship that can't be mended without forgiveness:
(10) The first lady has said through a spokesman that she forgives her husband.
The words "through a spokesman" open an odd public space within the privacy
of their relationship, underscoring the fact that the "president" and "first lady" are
offices as weU as individuals, and in this case, the "forgiveness" tendered has been
enacted institutionally, first lady to president, rather than personally, wife to husband.
Brokaw then concludes:
(11) For many days now, forgiveness is something that Mr. Clinton has been
asking for, not only of his wife, but of the nation.
In 11, the public/private has been redrawn anew. The words "but of the nation"
let us know that another public entity — the American public — is being invited
to forgive the president along with his wife."

345
" From Gal's
(2002) perspective, the salty details of the Clinton-Lewinsky once private and now
public affair could only strengthen the redrawing of Hillary as the private "long
suffering wife" who must now bear that burden in very public ways. Conventional
masculine readings of Hillary's predicament reach its peak at this point. Public
sympathy toward Hillary spikes.

346
This is sick:
"(14) And I'm very proud of the person I'm privileged to introduce, I'm proud of
his leadership; I'm proud of his commitment; I'm proud of what he gives our
country.
The "Hillary" that Pauley portrays becomes a poster for mascuhne readings, and
as Pauley reports, when bereft of political power, Hillary is beloveci:
(15) Once vilified for ambition and political overreaching when she took on
health care, now she's admired for being the faithful loving wife.
Helpless and in pain, Hillary is anointed a positive role model."

"But with the attending language of 17, the lack of intimacy in the image
is no longer used to signify marital strain. It is rather used to signify the emotional
distance and sober calctilation that have made them the über power couple for decades."

347
"And instead of seeking her help to salvage his oflice, she now seeks his
help to secure her own. On February 15, 1999, Brokaw declares the impeachment
trial "history" and opens up the "hot political buzz" of recent days, a buzz that
"got even louder today" when the president "spoke openly about the possibility" of
his wife's candidacy. Turning the report over to Andrea Mitchell, she reviews the
roles Hillary has played over the past: "loyal wife," "political victim," and "political
savior" and now through a disclosure ("friends say"), makes us aware that Hiflary
is "close to deciding on a new role for herself. Senator Hiflary Rodham Clinton.""


"As Mitchefl utters "clear the field," NBC once again shows the facial profile image
of Hillary at the memorial service. The image, so often used before to signify
isolation and weakness, seems out of place as a metaphor for Hiflary's new found
dominance. However, it does fit as a metaphor for Clinton's now newsworthy uncertainty
and mystery in terms of her Senate bid."

348

wow.
"Previous broadcasts had disclosed Hillary as a political partner, a betrayed wife,
and, most significantly, a loyal and loving vfiie. This broadcast, however, exposes
Hillary's predatory political ambitions. The cultural archetypes behind these role
shifts are polar opposites. A "loving wife" protects the boundaries of her family
at all costs against invaders. A carpetbagger invades territorial and familial livelihoods.
For a "loving wife," the private is admired when it comes into view. A
carpetbagger, like a conspirator, hides the private for self-protection as exposure
threatens censure and opprobrium. The "friends" of a "loving wife" drcle the wagons
to protect her. The "friends" of a "carpetbagger" are "accomplices" and "coconspirators"
who lurk in the shadows with the power of denial. Once, Hillary's
friends were salt-of-the-earth women offering hugs of support. Now, they are her
cronies who plot with her the taking of the Senate seat and worry that there won't
be enough political spoil for her. As Mitchell narrates in this broadcast:"

white house - public/ private space

349-350
" If Hillary has an image problem, the newscast suggests, the problem lies with the
U.S. public who, as Gregory notes, gave her undeserved credit in the 'Àctim role during
the Starr days, when the slightest display of "dignity, stamina, and strength [from
that role] sent her approval rating soaring." The public was not wrong, the broadcast
suggests, to admire Clinton's dignity, stamina and strength. The public was simply
wrong to base these positive attributions on the perception of her as a victim."

" Such insights are reminiscent of Bourdieu's (2001, 67) observation that when
women dare assert male dominance, they forfeit their "femininity" and create
backlash by challenging the "natural right" of men to positions of power.
The broadcast, "Hillary Clinton's turn in the spotlight, with Bill by her side,"
insinuates this assertion of power and the subsequent backlash. It first features
Hillary as the star of the family with Bill politically dead ("he's done...nobody
cares," asserts journalist Sally Ouinn during this report). But then re-enforcing
Bourdieu's predictions about male domination in the presence of female assertiveness,
NBC now turns a skeptical eye toward the rapidity of the marital power shift."
351
"that Bill now sees Hillary's political success
as "one of the most historic parts of his legacy." MitcheU suggests that the role
reversal has been fast, too fast, and, by implication, too transgressive from private
(presidential wife) to public (Senate candidate) spaces to be credible.
352
"The interplay of words and images, however, does not alone settle the meaning
of an image bite. Establishing the full contextual meaning further requires the
subjective background of the viewer. As Burnett (1995, 238) contends, "There is
an ambiguous link bet-veen the movement... from image to language and back"
that can only be connected by the viewer. As we saw in the pofling data, while
some female voters from New York resisted NBC's efforts to transform Hillary
from abused spouse to political candidate, another portion accepted this transformation,
suggesting guarded progress for public women who (public/ private)

353
"This case study thus also demonstrates the need to complicate feminist critical
discourse analyses through attention not only to the discourses used to frame women's
behavior but also to the performances of women as they seek to resist and/or accommodate
these framings. Such a performance-enriched critical approach punctuates
the complex interplay among texts, ideology, and human agency as agents
"(re)produce, resist, and oppose resistances to prevailing normative ideologies"
(Lazar, Politicizing, 2005, 21-22). Our aim in this paper has been to call attention
to this complex interplay across contexts where a major political figure was defined
and redefined several times anew through changing words rolling over unchanging
images."