The media’s 2016 freak out over Clinton’s pneumonia looks really suspect today – ThinkProgress
[ad_1] Six thousand years ago, during the last few months of the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton contracted a bout of walking pneumonia. The entire media world breathlessly covered her every movement that September day, when Clinton had to be helped into a van after baking in the summer sun at a 9/11 memorial ceremony. We learned several hours later that Clinton had retired to her daughter’s New York City apartment to cool off and recover, and that she had been diagnosed with a mild case of walking pneumonia. The whole episode reignited the well-worn — and casually sexist — narrative that Clinton, at 68 years old, might not have had the physical fortitude to assume the most important job in the world. It was a narrative pushed heavily by Donald Trump and his loathsome progeny, but the media was equally complicit. Of course the far-right, led by Fox News and the usual consortium of internet drudgery, assumed their battle stations, but so too did outlets like NPR, where...