In all seriousness, there was just no way I was going to maintain a writing schedule around the Presidential campaign. Sure, there was a few nuggets of gold from our vaunted pundit class, but it was the same nonsense you’d see almost anywhere. I was also gallivanting across the internets writing about things more interesting than this past election cycle.
So I’m back, and what better way to start than with an article about how women are oppressed on talks news programs, by being forced to dress provocatively and wear make up! Written by Kathleen Parker…wait a minute…this isn’t a Kathleen Parker authored article at all…this is Froma Harrop! This is impossible!
Surely, she and Kathleen Parker are friends, and while Ms. Harrop was making tea or a light lunch for the two as they chatted about being women pundits, Ms. Parker tore off towards Ms. Harrop’s office when her back was turned and wrote this incredibly stupid article. It’s the only possibility!
Let it be said now that in my second term as Mayor Of Haterville®, I’m going to broaden my ire towards anyone…not just right-wing blowhards, or “center-right” pundit stooges, or talking points memo written as though they're an independent thought housed by a singular author. No, I’m going after anything insipid that wanders the realm!
It pains me to have to do this to Ms. Harrop, I actually like her writing for the most part. She tends to not do these kind of “Oh, hey I’m a woman, I should write something about women!”, that’s mostly the ply and trade of any white woman pundit and seemingly monopolized by Kathleen Parker during these cold winter months where a pundit doesn’t feel like writing anything of substance. Even your local newspaper’s village idiots are carving out tepid lists of baloney culled from their litany of forwarded e-mails.
Perhaps Ms. Harrop, like a lot of her colleagues in the old-white man pundit class, is feeling a bit put out to pasture. As a middle-aged woman, she just can’t compete with the models that can read a teleprompter and chain together two sentences to form a talking point to regurgitate on a talk news show. Even a well educated, whip smart gal like Ms. Harrop can be a little jealous of her younger, more beautiful peers that she has to pretend are making salient points on these said shows.
It’s also odd that she uses Ann Curry and Mika Brzezinski as these vaunted classy women who have somehow transcended this sorority of vapidity and have become professional newswomen of honor. Except that nine months ago I wrote about this very kind of topic, somewhat. These two women absolutely do not represent a professional newswoman who’s somehow beat back the hard news dolls that have become the scourge of any woman over the age of thirty!
Ms. Harrop uses an Ann Curry quote about being pressed to wear high heels by her bosses. In said interview, Ms. Curry surmises that she was let go from The Today Show mostly because she didn’t want to play dress up, as she was a serious journalist! Not that she wasn’t a very good lead host or that, indeed she did dress up and wear the “ridiculously high-heeled shoes” commanded to her by her NBC overlords regardless of her bona fides. She was a company man…erm…woman all the way to the bank and back with her multimillion dollar contract. How is this somehow suppressing her? She didn’t have to do anything she didn’t want to, and she literally spent fifteen years at NBC, on the Today Show in her oppressive designer wardrobe.
Laughably, Mika is brought to the fore with her complaining that when she first started working on Morning Joe she too was “pushed” in to clothes that where “short, skimpy, tight”. But Ms. Harrop tells of how she escaped and that she now wears freedom incarnate in the form of “sweaters and collared shirts, which is what Joe wears.”
What?!
Obviously, and commenters of the online article also verify, Ms. Harrop hasn’t watched Morning Joe…ever. Even a cursory internet search of Mika Brzezinski provides ample evidence of the exact opposite of the point Ms. Harrop is trying to make. Mika’s wardrobe seems to be primarily those “form-fitting dresses, arms naked to the world” items!
I kid you not:
What’s even more insulting, had Ms. Harrop continued her Mika Brzezinski internet search in earnest she would see that every time one Donny Deutsch “wronged” her, he would apologize by giving her a pair of Christian Louboutin heels, which she then coos over and so on and so forth. She’s literally lets men treat her like dirt on Morning Joe, then goes oohing and aahing over heels! What a wonderfully professional newswoman! She’s transcended the doll mentality so hard, she must be ironically enjoying getting shoes from a man!
Ms. Harrop’s claim that perhaps news executives are “Ron Burgundys stuck in the age of disco” with their forcing their females news anchors to “tart up” to deliver the news. But it’s in her odd choices of Mika and Curry that torpedoes her entire argument. These are two women who are holding BACK women from progressing in the news world. It’s been noted that the journalism is indeed a bloodsport full of men, where women have had to fight just to get on air. Progress has been slow, and many, many women have transcended the boys club to be respected journalists. Mika Brzezinski and Ann Curry are not those women, not even in the slightest. They have dutifully been “the skirt” on their respective programs and any respect they get is given in empty platitudes and pats on the heads by their bosses.
Unfortunately for all of this, I don’t empathize in the slightest for the plights of any millionaire news “journalist” that complains that they’re being oppressed by their “chauvinistic” bosses. I’m fairly certain both women have been offered more respectable position in other news operations, but probably for less money. What’s easier, wearing a skirt and heels then being all oppressed on the side, or doing the real yeoman’s journalistic work for peanuts, but more respect amongst your colleagues? It’s clear that Curry and Brzezinski took the easier route, for that they deserve no sympathy from women who do work in deplorable, boys clubs in the hopes of even being that vaunted “skirt” on a news show.
Thankfully, future generations of newswomen are rising up and will indeed use Curry and Brzezinski as a battering ram to smash that glass ceiling and garner true respect for their fields and themselves. Of course, they will pay these women respect, but it will all be lip service, as they, on top of their tanned, short skirted peers on Fox News, have done nothing to advance the cause for women’s right’s in a male dominated career path.
