KEENE, New Hampshire — Tulsi Gabbard expressed frustration with media coverage of her campaign compared to that of Pete Buttigieg, even though both are veterans.
“Did you ever expect to be smeared so viciously like Bernie Sanders by the media?” a young attendee in the crowd of over 100 at a Gabbard presidential campaign event asked the Hawaii congresswoman.
“I knew I wasn’t gonna get any favors,” said Gabbard, 38. “Unfortunately, from the very first day that I began running for president, the efforts coming from within the media and their friends to smear my character and make false accusations against me, and so on, began immediately.”
Gabbard mentioned a graphic she saw that compared headlines in the first month of announcing her candidacy for president in January 2019 to that of Buttigieg, the 38-year-old former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, in the month after he entered the race.
“The contrast was very stark,” she said. “The headlines were largely negative, nothing about making history as the first female combat veteran ever to run for president or any one of another number of things. And it was a very different narrative and story that was largely positive for the other veteran who’s running for president.”
Gabbard has served in the Hawaii Army National Guard for almost 17 years and still deploys for training, taking her away from the campaign trail. She deployed to Iraq for 12 months starting in 2004 and was awarded a Combat Medical Badge for supporting infantry engaged in active combat. In 2009, she led a military police platoon in Kuwait. She remains a major in the Guard.
Buttigieg was in the Navy Reserve from 2009 to 2017 and, during his first mayoral term in 2014, served about six months in Kabul, Afghanistan. He was an intelligence officer and spent most of his time on the base but has often mentioned that he left base while driving an armored vehicle and “crossed the wire” 119 times, by his own count.
Buttigieg skyrocketed to stardom due in part to glowing media profiles and is now in the top tier of four candidates in Iowa and New Hampshire while Gabbard lags in the polls with single digits both nationally and in early voting states.
“All we expect and hope for from the media is fairness and the truth,” Gabbard said, mentioning that she introduced legislation to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, a policy that required media outlets to present contrasting views. “More and more people are, unfortunately — they’re looking for their news elsewhere, questioning if what they’re seeing in the media is true or fair or real.”
