Where have you been, Billy boys, Billy boys?
As to the unmasking, unemploying and paying off of Fox News Casanova Bill O’Reilly, the Caller Who Never Leaves His Name suggests that lover boy’s first name — Bill Cosby, Bill O’Reilly, Billy Bush, Bill Clinton — means trouble.
Nonetheless, O’Reilly may have a future. “At least he could still be president of the United States,” observes Andy Gold. And Steve Rozzi suggests “Maybe the Donald can give him a job at the White House ... in charge of frisking the females when they enter.”
Which reminds me: Journalist William Cohan writes in the latest Vanity Fair about Metropolitan Museum Director Thomas Campbell, who will step down at the end of June after having made a mess of things at that institution. After alleging mismanagement difficulties, Cohan writes:
“Another problem was Campbell’s friskiness with certain women on the staff. He had been warned about it early in his tenure but still carried on. More recently a legal action was brought against him and the Met, but it was settled.” Friskiness? Is sexual harassment naughty, or is it taboo?
Perhaps it would be useful — in separating the frisky from the criminal — to create a 1-to-10 Frisky Scale for co-workers’ conversational forays:
(1) “There’s no more paper in the printer” (non-problematic, unless office manager is a dominatrix); (2) “Nice shoes” (metrosexual); (3) “You got weekend plans?” (friendly or perhaps daring);
(4) “Nice skirt” (borderline frisky, depending on how long the glance lingers);
(5) “Nice eyes” (same as skirt comment, but often an attempt to fake interest in emotion rather than sex);
(6) “You, too?” (faux naive, as though the thought has never entered the speaker’s mind);
(7) “I don’t care what HR says, I can’t help myself ” (if it wasn’t in my job description, it should have been);
(8) “They told me I should do more social media; this is the social” (#everybodylovesme);
(9) “It was a great vacation. We took the family to New York, and I earned 20 Marriott points” (I’m paying for the room, you bring the sandwich);
(10) “Not here!” (the microwave is watching, and now you’ve ruined my earbud and it’s company property).
P.S. Ellen Pao, who lost her gender discrimination suit against Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Anita Hill, whose testimony against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas didn’t keep him off the Supreme Court, were in conversation sponsored by the Kapor Center for Social Impact on Thursday, April 20. Interviewer Michele Norris asked audience members to raise their hands if they knew someone who’d been sexually harassed, and “it looked like 100 percent raised a hand,” said a woman who was there.
P.P.S. Meanwhile, a full-page ad placed in the April 13 Hollywood Reporter by Bell and Co., personal financial managers, read: “We applaud our friend and client Bill O’Reilly, in recognition of his long career filled with integrity in reporting, talking points, pithy comments and a lifetime of generosity, kindness, loyalty & support for his many friends and loved ones.”
There used to be a romance about the newsroom, when a man wearing a visor rushed out of the wire room with loosely coiled rolls of paper jitteringly printed and noisily emitted by the AP and UPI wire machines, while transmitted photographs rolled forth from adjacent machines. This was roughly the system that fed the newspaper’s maw in 1983, when photographers Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel and Managing Editor Constance Lewallen created the first “Newsroom,” an installation at the UC Berkeley Art Museum. As Charles Desmarais wrote, Jason Fulford, Jim Goldberg and Dru Donovan’s modern version of that installation, “Fake Newsroom,” is at the Minnesota Street Project until Saturday, April 29.
It’s about a different aspect of newsroom romance: the assembling of images that serve as storytellers. I saw it while Goldberg was serving as editor. Photos and photo fragments were piled around the room; a few assistants (students from the California College of the Arts and the San Francisco Art Institute, in a perhaps first-ever collaboration) peered at computer screens, and a meeting was in progress, as they often are. My own vision of newsroom paradise includes doughnuts, but there was no pink box in sight.
Editor Goldberg said he’d bring chickens in the next day to decide on the newspaper’s content. I checked the site http://fakenewsroom.org/adwoeir and saw a drawing of a chicken.