In high-powered New York City, impropriety an ‘epidemic’
“New York is where the power is, and this is fundamentally a scandal about power and the abuse of power in sexual ways.” Mark Feldstein Broadcast journalism professor at the University of Maryland and a former NBC journalist
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 last 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 Morn
ing 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.
“New York is where the power is, and this is fundamentally a scandal about power and the abuse of power in sexual ways,” said Feldstein, a former journalist at NBC. “When I was a network correspondent, it was often a running joke about the ugly TV executives bedding the beautiful on-air women, who otherwise obviously wouldn’t have given them the time of day. … It seemed to be a consensual casting couch mentality that resembled the Hollywood version of that.”
That’s why there’s a concurrent wave of harassment allegations hitting Hollywood, too, he says. “It’s happening in Los Angeles because in the entertainment industry, that is where the power is, and if you look at sex scandals in politics, Washington is going to be the capital (place) because that is where political power is based,” Feldstein said. “I suspect if you looked at impropriety in the fashion industry or finance industries, New York would also be tops.”
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: Whis
tle 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 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. “There were very few women who I talked to at 60
Minutes who did not have a story like this,” Hertsgaard said. “It is and has been an epidemic.”
The blowback in New York has not been confined to on-air talent and top executives or even TV newsrooms. On the same day that Lauer was fired for inappropriate behavior, so was Teddy Davis, a CNN senior producer on the network’s State of the Union show, hosted by Jake Tapper.
Online content company Vox Media, headquartered in New York, fired editorial director Lockhart Steele, in October after allegations of sexual misconduct. And the president and publisher of the New Republic, Hamilton Fish, quit last month following charges made against him.