Fox News and the Repercussions of Sexual Harassment
According to Gabriel Sherman, an editor atNew York magazine who has kept a close eye on Ailes and Fox News for several years now, the former chairman spent millions of dollars from the network’s budget to settle sexual-harassment claims and to maintain a cadre of consultants and private detectives
.. “It was the culture,” one Fox executive told Sherman. “You didn’t ask questions, and Roger wouldn’t entertain questions.” When it came to sexual harassment, ideology surely played a role, too: given the pervasive scorn at Fox for “political correctness,” or feminism of any stripe, it must have been especially hard to be an ambitious woman who chose to make a stink, to risk looking like what Carlson says Ailes called her—“a man hater.”
.. sexual harassment may be even more prevalent, she said, where women are “gaining power in the workplace, and it becomes a way of trying to reëstablish who’s actually in charge.”
.. McLaughlin says that these findings make sense, because, she believes, workplace sexual harassment isn’t really about sex; it’s about power.
.. The appeal, for a guy like Ailes, of using the office as your personal hunting ground may have more to do with trying to leverage your authority there to get women who’d be out of your league on the more even playing field of Tinder.
.. some women who reported offensive behavior paid the price that women often fear: “They were labelled as untrustworthy or ‘not a team player’ and were subsequently passed over for promotion or excluded by their colleagues.”