{"id":118876,"date":"2017-11-21T09:15:12","date_gmt":"2017-11-21T17:15:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=118876"},"modified":"2017-11-21T09:17:52","modified_gmt":"2017-11-21T17:17:52","slug":"revolt-of-foxs-hens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=118876","title":{"rendered":"Revolt of Fox\u2019s Hens"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Sheelah Kolhatkar \u2022 10\/25\/04 on Observer.com<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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…<\/p>\n

Even in Ms. Mackris\u2019 telling, her part of the dance was to coddle, to enable and\u2014after leaving Fox for CNN\u2014to return to Mr. O\u2019Reilly 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.<\/p>\n

And, according to Ms. Mackris, his threats: \u201cIf any woman ever breathed a word I\u2019ll make her pay so dearly that she\u2019ll wish she\u2019d never been born,\u201d Ms. Mackris said he told her in a telephone conversation. \u201cI\u2019ll rake her through the mud, bring up things in her life and make her so miserable that she\u2019ll be destroyed. And besides, she wouldn\u2019t be able to afford the lawyers I can or endure it financially as long as I can. And nobody would believe her, it\u2019d be her word against mine and who are they going to believe? Me or some unstable woman making outrageous accusations. They\u2019d see her as some psycho, someone unstable. Besides, I\u2019d never make the mistake of picking unstable crazy girls like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

…\u201cThey love their women dolled up,\u201d said another former Fox News staffer who had worked in the D.C. bureau. \u201cIt\u2019s not saying they don\u2019t like women who aren\u2019t smart. But women at Fox were in trouble if they were on air and they weren\u2019t dressed like a hooker. Everybody at Fox is painfully aware of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

…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\u2014which wasn\u2019t something the producer could judge with pure moral clarity. After all, it worked. \u201cIt was her goal to get on the air,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd she made it. She got what she wanted. It\u2019s a very tricky\u2014it\u2019s murky. It\u2019s very murky.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2014up to a point.<\/p>\n

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\u2014which, of course, put the younger women into the very compromising positions that inspired harassment.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do think in network news, it\u2019s so incredibly cutthroat\u2014for a woman to get to that level, she loses all sense of what she was like as a young woman,\u201d said a former Fox News staffer who didn\u2019t want her current network affiliation to be known. \u201cShe had to sacrifice so much\u2014why should she help a young woman?\u201d<\/p>\n

Said another female CNN producer, \u201cThere aren\u2019t that many female executive producers. And they\u2019re mean to those girls who are pretty and want to be on television.\u201d One cable news producer said that the most verbally abusive boss she\u2019d ever had had been a woman…<\/p>\n

The TV news business offers a unique setup for the kind of behavior that Mr. O\u2019Reilly 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\u2014the producers and bookers, assistants and interns\u2014who scramble for guests and keep their bosses\u2019 egos inflated.<\/p>\n

Most of the on-air and off-air TV news people said that the way network and cable news is produced\u2014from the basic flow chart in your average production to the required hours\u2014creates 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.<\/p>\n

One prominent and current male on-air host described his view of the social and sexual dynamic of the television news world:<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the producing level, it\u2019s all young women,\u201d he said, \u201c99 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\u2019s be totally clear. The temptation to fuck your staff is overwhelming\u2014literally, almost overwhelming. You just can\u2019t imagine how sexually out of control it is. A quarter of the women are bisexual. They\u2019re good-looking, they\u2019re totally without restraint. Nobody has family around, you\u2019re on the road traveling, and you\u2019re making $7 million a year and they\u2019re making $65,000 a year. That\u2019s three grand a month to live in the big city. You\u2019ve got all the money\u2014in every way, you\u2019re the sheik, they\u2019re the harem. You can\u2019t overstate how true that is. That\u2019s a natural dynamic.\u201d<\/p>\n

The news personality said that the job descriptions of most of the behind-the-scenes staff\u2014including the producer\u2014is 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll they do all day long, they\u2019re job is to serve you,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s explicitly their job. How you look, how you sound\u2014everything is focused on you.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cfuck-me\u201d shoes, invitations to return to hotel rooms, clunky and incessant sexual innuendo (e.g., \u201cI\u2019d like to help you get a-head, ha ha ha!\u201d), unwelcome shoulder rubs, shameless requests for dates, three-way orgies and oral sex\u2014all by well-known male on-air personalities and powerful news executives at the top of network and cable channels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Sheelah Kolhatkar \u2022 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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,29576],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-118876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abuse","category-fox-2"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t