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The Men Who Cost Clinton the Election - Men Like Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

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Against the backdrop of ongoing destruction, the sheer madness of the Trump Administration and the insane hubris of GOP congresspeople, NYT journalist Jill Filipovic writes about the male journalists, now standing accused of sexual harassment, who interviewed and wrote about Hillary Clinton with such condescending and ugly nastiness, who forbade her to speak intelligently, who undercut her at every turn and who treated Donald Trump with kid gloves.

Some of us on Kos have noticed this too — it’s so obvious! But in the context of the sexual harassment their misogyny takes on an even more sinister tone and it’s difficult to believe their projection didn’t create an image of Hillary Clinton that fit with their prejudices — that they actually created a monster out of thin air because she didn’t match their desire for a compliant, sexually accomodating female.

Shame on them. They bear a great responsibility for hurting HRC, obviously — but now look at the damage — threats to essentially devastate national monuments like Bears Ears; the ghastly “tax reform” bill that threatens us all; the assault on national agencies like EPA and the Consumer Protection Bureau — Trump’s naked bigotry — misogyny has dreadful consequences and this time we’re all the victims.

Matt Lauer, like Charlie Rose and Mark Halperin before him, is a journalist out of a job after his employer fired him for sexually harassing female colleagues. It’s good news that real penalties are now leveled on men who harass — after centuries of the costs mostly befalling the women who endure harassment. But the deep cultural rot that has corroded nearly all of our institutions and every corner of our culture is not just about a few badly behaved men. Sexual harassment, and the sexism it’s predicated on, involves more than the harassers and the harassed; when the harassers are men with loud microphones, their private misogyny has wide-reaching public consequences. One of the most significant: the 2016 election.

Many of the male journalists who stand accused of sexual harassment were on the forefront of covering the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Matt Lauer interviewed Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump in an official “commander-in-chief forum” for NBC. He notoriously peppered and interruptedMrs. Clinton with cold, aggressive, condescending questions hyper-focused on her emails, only to pitch softballs at Mr. Trump and treat him with gentle collegiality a half-hour later. Mark Halperin and Charlie Rose set much of the televised political discourse on the race, interviewing other pundits, opining themselves and obsessing over the electoral play-by-play. Mr. Rose, after the election, took a tone similar to Mr. Lauer’s with Mrs. Clinton — talking down to her, interrupting her, portraying her as untrustworthy. Mr. Halperin was a harsh critic of Mrs. Clinton, painting her as ruthless and corrupt, while going surprisingly easy on Mr. Trump. The reporter Glenn Thrush, currently on leave from The New York Times because of sexual harassment allegations, covered Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign when he was at Newsday and continued to write about her over the next eight years for Politico.

Think about that. Men who hate challenging women, who don’t want competition from women, who abuse female underlings, who limit the careers of talented women, because they’re women, projected all this misogyny onto the accomplished, brilliant Hillary Clinton and they essentially destroyed her. They created a witch out of thin air. They prevented her from speaking, from telling the people her plans, her ideas. Yet when we try to speak of this we’re told we’re thinking with our vaginas and that the problem isn’t Clinton’s gender but something about her, personally.

Phooey.

Sexual harassment at the hands of political journalists also pulls back the curtain on how too many of these men view women generally. The journalists in question are accused of a range of behaviors, some more serious than others, from drunken unsolicited kisses to, in Mr. Lauer’s case, sexual assault (in addition to exposing himself to a colleague and sending another a sex toy with a note detailing how he would like to use it on her). The theme running through nearly all of the complaints is a man in a position of power who saw the women around him not as competent colleagues or as even sovereign human beings, but as sexual objects he could either proposition to boost his ego or humiliate to feed a desire for domination.

It’s hard to look at these men’s coverage of Mrs. Clinton and not see glimmers of that same simmering disrespect and impulse to keep women in a subordinate place. When men turn some women into sexual objects, the women who are inside that box are one-dimensional, while those outside of it become disposable; the ones who refuse to be disposed of, who continue to insist on being seen and heard, are inconvenient and pitiable at best, deceitful shrews and crazy harpies at worst. That’s exactly how some commentary and news coverage treated Mrs. Clinton.

Inconvenient; pitiable; deceitful; shrewish; a crazy harpie.

Oh yeah.

Sounds familiar doesn’t it.

I don’t have words for my anger right now. I stayed up last night watching Cspan as the Republicans voted on scribbled notes in the margins of a bill so huge few could possibly have even read it, a bill that will strip health care from Americans, that empowers FETUSES — with incalculable harm to women — that will gut the social safety nets — that raises taxes on poor people.

Anger, frustration, tears — determination to somehow make this right.

But how? How are we supposed to fight these horrible men? I watched last night in shock as a bunch of old white people, aided by a couple of corrupt WOMEN who were clearly bribed — one by a promise to open drilling in a treasured national game reserve, another by some vague feel good stuff about Medicare — stole our futures, perhaps sealed our death warrants, and burdened our children.

The fix is in. We thought, we really though we were making progress. And just as it looked as though a glass ceiling would shatter our incredibly well-qualified, good-hearted, well-meaning, gifted, smart BUT FEMALE standard-bearer was cut off at the knees by these creeps, who helped put an unqualified, criminal, arguably crazy p***y grabber into the White House of the United States of America and handed him the vast power of our security state and our armies.

And the demographic breakout was appalling. Who voted against Hillary Clinton in droves? WHITE MEN is who.

I’m angry, and I’m frightened for the future.
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