Daily Insanity

Between Progressive DC and the Nutwork Media Centers, the Poobahs of perverse behavior have pants with no zippers or uncontrollable hands. Or both conditions in many cases.

Is the mantra at 30 Rock and elsewhere “Start grinning and drop the linen!” to any ‘chippie’ that walks into an office?

New York’s TV industry riddled by harassment accusations

If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere, the song goes.

Evidently, making it in the highly-competitive television news industry in the Big Apple has often meant, for women, enduring sexual harassment at the hands of their male co-workers.

The list of men ousted from high-profile seats of TV power grew this week with NBC’s ousting Wednesday of Today co-anchor Matt Lauer.

But NBC is not alone. All of the major television networks have been hit with similar situations recently, making Lauer just the latest in a line that most recently includes Charlie Rose, who co-hosted CBS This Morning and had his own nightly show, produced by Bloomberg Television and aired on PBS for 26 years. He was dismissed from all three networks two weeks ago after accusations of sexual harassment and assault.

NBC News also last month terminated its contract with political analyst Mark Halperin who also appears on MSNBC. He had been accused of sexually harassing women while he worked at ABC News as political director in the late 1990s and much of the 2000s. Showtime also dismissed Halperin should the premium channel continue its political documentary series The Circus, which he co-hosted.

Back in April, Fox News Channel dismissed Bill O’Reilly, host of the network’s ratings leader The O’Reilly Report after an internal investigation prompted by The New York Times report that Fox and O’Reilly had paid millions to settle several sexual harassment accusations. O’Reilly’s ouster followed the July 2016 resignation of Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, who had also faced allegations of sexual impropriety.

That media scandals would arise in New York makes sense because that is where the major outlets’ headquarters reside and house the executives who have the power to hire and promote staffers, says Mark Feldstein, a broadcast journalism professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. [snip]

Harassment has permeated the media industry for decades, we’ve learned as the accusations have been made public. Many victims have remained quiet over fear of reprisal.

But the recent revelations do not surprise Mark Hertsgaard, an investigative editor for The Nation and author of several books, including Bravehearts: Whistle Blowing in the Age of Snowden. When sent to CBS News in the early ’90s to do a story on 60 Minutes and its kid-glove treatment of President Reagan for Rolling Stone, as the magazine’s then-media reporter, Hertsgaard switched gears upon seeing out-in-the-open harassment.

While talking to a female producer, Hertsgaard saw Mike Wallace walk by and slap the behind of the woman with a rolled-up magazine. “I look at her and my mouth drops open and I said, ‘Does that happen much here?’ She said, ‘You wouldn’t believe.’ That is how I got onto the story,” he said The story was published in May of 1991.

He talked to three women who would not go on the record because show creator Don Hewitt “like Harvey Weinstein, for that matter, was famous for being vindictive and ruining peoples’ careers,” Hertsgaard said.

Wallace, the women told him, repeatedly put his hands on the thighs of his producers during meetings and snapped and unsnapped women’s bra straps from behind “like an eighth-grade boy” would do, Hertsgaard said. [snip]

Betsy West can attest to that. Currently the Fred W. Friendly professor at the Columbia Journalism School in New York, West oversaw 60 Minutes as the senior vice president at CBS News from 1997 to 2005. Her time there coincided with that of Hewitt, who stepped down as executive producer in 2004 (he died in 2009), and Wallace, who became a correspondent emeritus in 2006 before retiring in 2008 (he died in 2012).

“By that time I think a lot of that had abated or I didn’t witness that myself,” she said. “But certainly there were stories about that atmosphere. It did sometimes feel like a boys’ club.” [snip]