By Sheelah Kolhatkar • 10/25/04 on Observer.com:
TV news is a generally inhospitable place for women to work. It often involves unequal pay for comparable work. It nurtures and inspires sexual harassment in a pressured, heightened environment filled with risks and rewards, highs and lows, and often staffed by malleable younger women producers and assistants assigned to the care and feeding of outsized male egos…
Even in Ms. Mackris’ telling, her part of the dance was to coddle, to enable and—after leaving Fox for CNN—to return to Mr. O’Reilly despite her creepy feelings about him, which led to an incessant, seamy courtship of dinners, dirty telephone calls and exposure to what she described as his preoccupation with loofas and vibrators.
And, according to Ms. Mackris, his threats: “If any woman ever breathed a word I’ll make her pay so dearly that she’ll wish she’d never been born,” Ms. Mackris said he told her in a telephone conversation. “I’ll rake her through the mud, bring up things in her life and make her so miserable that she’ll be destroyed. And besides, she wouldn’t be able to afford the lawyers I can or endure it financially as long as I can. And nobody would believe her, it’d be her word against mine and who are they going to believe? Me or some unstable woman making outrageous accusations. They’d see her as some psycho, someone unstable. Besides, I’d never make the mistake of picking unstable crazy girls like that.”
…“They love their women dolled up,” said another former Fox News staffer who had worked in the D.C. bureau. “It’s not saying they don’t like women who aren’t smart. But women at Fox were in trouble if they were on air and they weren’t dressed like a hooker. Everybody at Fox is painfully aware of that.”
…The CNN producer described a young woman co-worker at the cable network who had strategically slept with older, more powerful men to advance her career—which wasn’t something the producer could judge with pure moral clarity. After all, it worked. “It was her goal to get on the air,” she said. “And she made it. She got what she wanted. It’s a very tricky—it’s murky. It’s very murky.”
Other women professionals described a recent shift in the stylistic choices of college interns invading the stations: girls in shorts skirts and high boots, who were clearly aware of the power their looks afforded and were willing to work it—up to a point.
Many women said that for young females looking for mentors in the business, older men were much more willing to dole out attention and guidance than were the jaded, established women who were working against the clock, juggling face-lifts to prolong their television careers—which, of course, put the younger women into the very compromising positions that inspired harassment.
“I do think in network news, it’s so incredibly cutthroat—for a woman to get to that level, she loses all sense of what she was like as a young woman,” said a former Fox News staffer who didn’t want her current network affiliation to be known. “She had to sacrifice so much—why should she help a young woman?”
Said another female CNN producer, “There aren’t that many female executive producers. And they’re mean to those girls who are pretty and want to be on television.” One cable news producer said that the most verbally abusive boss she’d ever had had been a woman…
The TV news business offers a unique setup for the kind of behavior that Mr. O’Reilly is accused of: Aging, highly paid, powerful men dominate on air and behind the scenes, while armies of ambitious, underpaid, beautiful young women serve as their foot soldiers—the producers and bookers, assistants and interns—who scramble for guests and keep their bosses’ egos inflated.
Most of the on-air and off-air TV news people said that the way network and cable news is produced—from the basic flow chart in your average production to the required hours—creates an atmosphere primed for power relationships to exert themselves. Often, staff find themselves working late in close quarters, traveling from city to city, hotel to hotel, bar to bar.
One prominent and current male on-air host described his view of the social and sexual dynamic of the television news world:
“At the producing level, it’s all young women,” he said, “99 percent of whom have no chance of being on TV. They like being in TV and they like powerful men. Each host has around him lots of good-looking, unmarried women. Women are excited by power, let’s be totally clear. The temptation to fuck your staff is overwhelming—literally, almost overwhelming. You just can’t imagine how sexually out of control it is. A quarter of the women are bisexual. They’re good-looking, they’re totally without restraint. Nobody has family around, you’re on the road traveling, and you’re making $7 million a year and they’re making $65,000 a year. That’s three grand a month to live in the big city. You’ve got all the money—in every way, you’re the sheik, they’re the harem. You can’t overstate how true that is. That’s a natural dynamic.”
The news personality said that the job descriptions of most of the behind-the-scenes staff—including the producer—is to focus positive attention on the on-air personality, to make him look and sound smart and handsome and to keep his ego well-inflated.
“All they do all day long, they’re job is to serve you,” he said. “That’s explicitly their job. How you look, how you sound—everything is focused on you.”
Most of the women interviewed had a pretty easy time reciting tales from the TV-news locker room of unwanted touching and groping, compliments on “fuck-me” shoes, invitations to return to hotel rooms, clunky and incessant sexual innuendo (e.g., “I’d like to help you get a-head, ha ha ha!”), unwelcome shoulder rubs, shameless requests for dates, three-way orgies and oral sex—all by well-known male on-air personalities and powerful news executives at the top of network and cable channels.
