Samantha Bee posits that, just maybe, “shitty media men” couldn’t fairly cover Hillary Clinton

On Wednesday’s Full Frontal, Samantha Bee addressed the daily, incessant, eye-opening revelations about powerful male media figures being all manner of sex creeps by pointing out how Hillary Clinton was habitually described during her 2016 presidential campaign. Playing a clearly not difficult to find montage of media types labeling the first female presidential candidate from a major political party with terms like “shrill,” “loud,” “grating,” “not likable,” “artificial,” “caustic,” “dull,” “robotic,” and “guarded,” Bee deadpanned the response, “Yeah! Why is that shrill robot so guarded? Tell me!” And while this coded misogyny was shown to come from every corner of the 24-hour cable news rant-o-sphere, Bee pointed out that some of the men whose criticism of Clinton betrayed that bias the most are now currently very, very unemployed.

Mark Halperin, Matt Lauer, Glenn Thrush, and Charlie Rose, Bee noted, all seem to have answered her rhetorical question, “Can men who hate women be objective journalists?” Bee showed Rose pressing Clinton on her emails and Lauer repeatedly interrupting her during his disastrous turn as moderator in a televised forum. Meanwhile, Bee also showed Halperin critiquing Clinton’s manner in an on-camera statement Bee described as “Why she not like man?!” while, in an interview with Trump, he’s shown asking the candidate—who’d been accused by multiple women of everything from sexual harassment to assault—what sort of food he likes to eat. Of course, finding isolated incidents of sexism from men later revealed to be—at the same time—engaging in serial abuse of their power against female coworkers and others doesn’t prove anything, right? Sadly for the skeptics, Bee came armed with the fact that—again, mysteriously—analysis of media coverage of the election has shown that “Clinton’s emails” took up four times more space than any stories about Donald Trump’s “gross behavior.” Strange, that.