Beyond the Headlines: How to Find Role Models with Expertise

Emily Jasper writes this guest post for 9 Ways. Emily Jasper’s blog was chosen as one of ForbesWoman’s top 100 websites for women. Here’s the bio she sent to accompany this inspiring guest post:

Known to rip apart magazines to write in the white space, I’m constantly thinking about what to write next. I write about my own observations at my blog From the Gen Y Perspective. In addition to questioning the various perspectives different from my own and those of my generation, I am passionate about filling my time with ways to connect with the world.

Women’s History Month always gets me thinking about role models. It’s been argued that finding women who are role models for our future female leaders can be a little tricky. When reports include the fact that women still make up only 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs, I see what the proverbial they are saying. Most of us look to our mothers, teachers, and community leaders if we feel like it’s hard to find someone else in the limelight who really is a role model.

I realized about a year ago, however, the women who are my role models are leaders because of their expertise and what they do with it.

Most of my role models are female journalists and writers. While they are successful at reporting, I’m really attracted to their proficiency and passion. These women take all the education and wisdom they’ve learned from being on the leading edge of news or research, and they share it with us in the telling of stories.

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Media Matters: So Now the Press Tells Candidates When to Quit?

This article from the media watchdog organization Media Matters is such a well documented analysis of the media’s current push for Hillary Clinton to exit the race for president that I wanted to share it in full. Regardless of which candidate you support, you can’t help but be aghast by how the echo chamber reverberates through and by the political media. The piece lays bare the process by which a narrative gets floated, then picked up widely from the New York Times to the local radio talk show, then beaten like a drum until it fills all the airwaves and leaves no room for a different point of view. And in this case, the narrative has a distinctly sexist tinge; all the better that a man, Eric Boehlert, wrote it. So no one can say the author is just being paranoid. Read on…

So now the press tells candidates when to quit?

History continues to unfold on many levels as the protracted Democratic Party primary race marches on, featuring the first woman and the first African-American with a real shot at winning the White House.

Here’s another first: the press’s unique push to get a competitive White House hopeful to drop out of the race. It’s unprecedented.

Looking back through modern U.S. campaigns, there’s simply no media model for so many members of the press to try to drive a competitive candidate from the field while the primary season is still unfolding.

Until this election cycle, journalists simply did not consider it to be their job to tell a contender when he or she should stop campaigning. That was always dictated by how much money the campaign still had in the bank, how many votes the candidate was still getting, and what very senior members of the candidate’s own party were advising.

In this case, Howard Dean, the head of the Democratic National Committee, said he was “dumbfounded” by public demands for Clinton to drop out last month. (He now wants one of the candidates to quit after the final June 3 primary.) Yet lots of pundits have suggested that in a neck-and-neck campaign in which neither candidate will likely secure the nomination based on pledged delegates, Sen. Hillary Clinton must drop out before all the states have had a chance to vote.

I realize the political debate surrounding the extended Democratic campaign remains a hot one, with people holding passionate opinions about the delegate math involved and what the consequences for the Democratic Party could be. I’m not weighing in on that debate. I’m focusing on how journalists have behaved during this campaign.

And the fact is, the media’s get-out-now push is unparalleled. Strong second-place candidates such as Ronald Reagan (1976), Ted Kennedy, Gary Hart, Jesse Jackson, and Jerry Brown, all of whom campaigned through the entire primary season, and most of whom took their fights all the way to their party’s nominating conventions, were never tagged by the press and told to go home.

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