When our trusted storytellers are also the abusers
For decades, journalists Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Bill O’Reilly and Mark Halperin appeared in front of cameras and tried to help Americans understand the country and one another. Now that they’ve lost their jobs after multiple accusations of sexual abuse, we are left wondering what they taught us.
What did we collectively learn from Harvey Weinstein, the producer who chose which movies we saw, shaping our views of art and our ideals of beauty? Or from Louis C.K., who abused some women and excluded others from comedy projects, even as he made us laugh?
How much did the abuse of women — often younger, subordinate or not famous — by powerful male journalists factor into the stories they told us? What did we learn about power, politics, accountability, elections — or even about Hillary Clinton, the first female presidential candidate from a major party?
“Two men with this much disregard for women chose the stories seen by 8.5 million people — largely female — every morning for years,” Janice Min, a partial owner and former editor of The Hollywood Reporter, wrote on Twitter on Wednesday, in a reference to Lauer and Rose. “Think about the damage.”
https://twitter.com/janicemin/status/935928998365765632
There also are those apparently uninterested in examining how such behavior might have affected the work at all. Media personality Geraldo Rivera responded to reports of Lauer’s sexual abuse by referring to journalism as a “flirty business.”
Sad about @MLauer great guy, highly skilled & empathetic w guests & a real gentleman to my family & me. News is a flirty business & it seems like current epidemic of #SexHarassmentAllegations may be criminalizing courtship & conflating it w predation. What about #GarrisonKeillor?
— Geraldo Rivera (@GeraldoRivera) November 29, 2017
But one episode from the 2016 election cycle has been held up as a stark example, raising yet another question: What did the public internalize about Clinton when Lauer, a journalist best known for behaving like a fatherly scamp for NBC’s “Today” program, interrupted her at a presidential forum to tell her to be brief while explaining a policy decision?
In the interview, which was widely panned at the time, Lauer extensively questioned Clinton, a Democrat, about her use of a private email server. He failed to aggressively press Donald Trump, then the Republican nominee, about his policy views or challenge him on falsehoods. Clinton addressed the interview in her book, “What Happened,” calling Lauer’s interview “a pointless ambush.”
Hillary Clinton with NBC’s “Today” show co-anchor Matt Lauer during a forum in September 2016.
Clinton also took issue with Lauer’s handling of Trump: “You’ve had a very different background, in business,” Lauer told Trump as he prefaced a question. “So nobody would expect you to have taken over the last 20 years really deep dives into some of these issues.”
On Wednesday, Lauer was fired after several women said he had targeted them for abuse, including one woman who said he sexually assaulted her until she passed out.
There is no way to say what Lauer’s motivations were during his interview with Clinton. He may have interrupted and questioned her extensively because she was the more experienced candidate and presumed front-runner.
But that interview reads differently to many now, as do Lauer’s other on-camera interactions with powerful women that seemed garden-variety sexist or purely boneheaded at the time. In 2014, Lauer, a father of three, asked Mary Barra, the first female chief executive of General Motors and at the time a mother of two teenagers, if she could do both jobs well. In 2012, he remarked to actress Anne Hathaway that viewers had “seen a lot of you lately” after a photographer had crouched down to take a picture up her skirt.
Regina Lawrence, a professor at the University of Oregon who studies gender, media and elections, said people like Lauer have become stark examples of how powerful men can enforce a culture of abuse while having substantial control over what the public sees, consumes and ultimately feels.
“We still have to be cautious” about drawing absolute connections between an abuser’s behind-the-scenes behavior and public professional life, Lawrence said.
“But these are things that men have been doing in the course of their professional work: Mistreating, denigrating and objectifying women,” Lawrence said. “If they would objectify people that they work with and know, how much might they objectify women that they cover?”
She said it is also worth considering what the public was told about Trump — a man accused of assault by at least 10 women — during interviews and commentary as delivered by men who would go on to be named as abusers.
Charlie Rose during a live taping of “CBS This Morning” in New York in December 2014.
“The questions are being raised about how others might have covered Hillary Clinton,” Lawrence said. “But isn’t the real question: ‘How did they cover Donald Trump’”?
Halperin, one of America’s best-known political journalists, referred to Clinton as “prideful, aggrieved, confused” and a “Napoleon in a navy pantsuit and gumball-sized fake pearls” in “Game Change,” the book he co-authored in 2008. It was considered to be an definitive account of that year’s election.
Halperin’s thoughts on Trump’s behavior in 2016 were less harsh. In October 2016, shortly after audio emerged of Trump bragging about grabbing women’s genitals, Halperin appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to say he was skeptical of Trump’s accusers.
In another appearance on the program, Halperin said Trump had done “nothing illegal” to his accusers, characterizing the behavior as “boorish” and part of the Trump brand.
Halperin, a ubiquitously televised Washington insider, lost network contracts and a book deal in October after several women accused him of abuse while working at ABC News more than a decade ago.
With the departure of several powerful men who explained Trump’s candidacy and eventual presidency to the public, the focus is turning to the storytellers who will fill the vacancies. Among other big stories, they will be responsible for covering the thousands of women interested in running for political office.
Like other industries, newsrooms have often compelled less powerful employees to assimilate to an internal status quo to survive. The next hurdle in what feels like a national reckoning will be grappling with a white-male-dominated structure that allows — and in some cases, directs — decisions about news coverage.
“I would find it hard to believe that Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer, Garrison Keillor and the people accused of these things, that they spoke fundamentally differently about Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin than the rest of the male-dominated media” while on the air, said Kathleen Dolan, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
“I think as sick as that sounds, that’s just baseline misogyny,” said Dolan, who studies gender, politics and behavior. “That’s just basic male privilege that doesn’t even tap into their predatory behaviors.”
