Hillary Clinton’s election loss can be attributed to voters’ anger, her likability challenge, poor campaign tactics and the phenomenon of Donald Trump. Now we’re told we should add Charlie Rose opening his bathrobe to a job applicant. A thousand political science doctoral dissertations are soon to be launched, one fears.

Journalists including Rose, Matt Lauer, Mark Halperin and Glenn Thrush all stand accused of sexual harassing or assaulting female colleagues. But can they also be charged with losing Clinton the presidential election?

A provocative if far from ironclad thesis comes in a New York Times op-ed (“The Men Who Cost Clinton the Election”) by Jill Filipovic, author of The H Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness and a contributing Times opinion writer. In sum, she asserts that “many” of those charged with sexual harassment were “on the forefront” of coverage the election and thus influential. Then this:

“A pervasive theme of all of these men’s coverage of Mrs. Clinton was that she was dishonest and unlikable. These recent harassment allegations suggest that perhaps the problem wasn’t that Mrs. Clinton was untruthful or inherently hard to connect with, but that these particular men hold deep biases against women who seek power instead of sticking to acquiescent sex-object status.”

Really?

Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston political scientist, says, “Some of this is probably true, but I recall pretty near media narrative unanimity that Clinton was ‘cold,’ ‘distant’ and ‘unfriendly. Not sure these individuals were the only few. Thrush was also pretty hard on Trump (especially in the Off Message podcast he did when at Politico).”

“As an historical aside, incumbents (although Clinton was not technically so, she was running for her party’s third term) always complain that journalists are harder on them than challengers (i.e., 1992 Bush v. Clinton; 2000 Gore v Bush).”

Jennifer Lawless, a political scientist at American University (and a former congressional candidate in Rhode Island), says, “As a political scientist, I’m wary about making generalizations from a race that was the most unusual we’ve ever seen in presidential politics.”

“I agree with the characterization of the way that these particular men treated Clinton and Trump, but I would want to analyze their coverage of other candidates, as well as the way that men and women who are not sexual harassers covered Clinton and Trump, before I could conclude that there’s clear evidence for the argument.”

“As a woman and a former congressional candidate, though, I’d certainly prefer being covered by someone who hasn’t behaved this way and think I’d be far more likely to get a fair shake.”

Karen Tumulty of The Washington Post, one of the most respected longtime political reporters, forwarded some seemingly relevant links to past stories. The denominator: the rise of female reporters in covering the campaign. There was this from Politico’s Hadas Gold (now at CNN). And this from CNN’s Brian Stelter.

“For this thesis to work, it seems she should have backed it up with concrete examples that are specific to these men (did I miss any, beyond Lauer’s much-criticized debate performance?) And also to show that their coverage was significantly different from coverage of Clinton by male journalists who are not harassers and from coverage of Clinton by female reporters.”

Kathy Kiely, a longtime (and great) Washington reporter-editor who is now a journalism professor at the University of New Hampshire, says, “It’s totally worth wondering how much the presence of sex harassers in newsrooms—and bosses who tolerated them—affected the coverage of the campaign, especially coverage of Trump’s boorish behavior (hey, if you’re doing the same thing, why is that even a story?)”