Politico has just discovered something we at MRC have been noticing since 1996: women's magazines are a "liberal pipeline to soccer moms." Media reporter Hadas Gold announced “a Politico review of several of the magazines’ past few months of coverage suggests that readers will be getting a heavy dose of liberal cheerleading this campaign season along with their skincare, makeup and fashion tips.”
The headline was "Where the media loves Hillary Clinton." As if other establishment media outlets are anti-Hillary? “We’re thrilled that Hillary is in the race,” said Marie Claire Editor-in-Chief Anne Fulenwider, whose May issue included a section on the women who run Washington. “We’d love to see a woman president for the United States.” Vogue editor Anna Wintour was a major fundraiser for Obama-Biden.
Take Vogue. In the past few months, the magazine — whose fabled editor, Anna Wintour, is an unabashed Clinton fan and has even taken her shopping — has featured John Kerry, a book about the first lady, and a feature on the first gay male White House social secretary, Jeremy Barnard. Clinton was the first first lady to appear on the magazine’s cover and has appeared in the magazine at least seven times.
“I can only hope that all of you here in Little Rock will be celebrating her come November 2016,” Wintour said as she introduced Clinton at an event in Arkansas in 2013. “Just as all of us, all of us at Vogue, look forward to putting on the cover the first female president of the United States.”
Gold singled out Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire as the most political in their coverage, as both have stand-alone politics sections on their websites. "Cosmopolitan has a full-time politics writer; last October, Cosmo announced a get-out-the-vote campaign and even began endorsing candidates (though Editor Joanna Coles said the endorsements would be limited to the midterms). Marie Claire has hired former White House deputy chief of staff Alyssa Mastromonaco and former Jill Biden aide Courtney O’Donnell as contributors, while Glamour hired Giovanna Gray Lockhart, a former aide to Sen. Kristen Gillibrand and wife to former Clinton White House press secretary Joe Lockhart."
Coles was described as "perhaps the most vocal about only backing candidates who are abortion-rights supporters and favor equal pay and mandatory insurance coverage for contraception." But played down her enthusiasm for Hillary, asserting while “there’s a lot of excitement” about the former secretary of state among Cosmo readers, there’s also some anxiety over her perceived inevitability. Glamour editor Cindi Leive tried to deny her magazine leans left:
“When we first started three cycles ago, we really had to persuade the politicians to be in the magazine — we had to go through the whole eye-roll, ‘Ugh, is this going to be about fashion, are you going to do her do’s and don’t’s?’ Now, I don’t get any of that,” Leive said.
But Leive, whose magazine featured Michelle Obama on its May cover, pushed back against the idea that women’s magazines lean left.
“I think there’s a misconception that fashion or women’s fashion magazines lean one way, that we’re Democrats. So part of our coverage that we really adhere to is a fairness and a philosophy of being pro-woman, nonpartisan,” she said, noting that last fall she interviewed [freshman Rep. Elise] Stefanik and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.). “We have 20 million print and online readers, and these are women whose political views are not monolithic. We keep that top of mind when it comes to our coverage of Washington and politics.”
Don't buy it. See our collection of Glamour's political tilt.
