Why Women Journalists Are Ascendant in the Age of Trump

[demmiblue]

From television to newspapers, women are occupying more visible and powerful roles in the ranks of journalists. How has the Trump administration contributed to this changing state of affairs?

Source: Vanity Fair

The me-Tarzan heyday of political broadcast journalism’s “big swinging dicks” (to borrow Michael Lewis’s hallowed term) has entered its twilight phase, a long-overdue development obvious to everyone except those little swinging dicks who keep injuring themselves trying to perpetuate the old swagger. Lift the lid on the lusty telenovela at Fox News, if you dare, where once testosterone, cigar smoke, and rampant innuendo were the seething norm under the long reign of former chairman and C.E.O. Roger Ailes, whose emperorship ended in shabby disgrace after a cluster bomb of sexual-harassment accusations. Ailes—who did not live to enjoy the golden parachute from his former employer, dying from a subdural hematoma in May—was soon followed on the exit runway by the network’s biggest star and gnarliest samurai, Bill O’Reilly, who also allegedly let his grabby hands and mouthy comments roam where they oughtn’t. (Gangplanked by Fox, O’Reilly is trying out a subscription-based, Internet-only show, which I look forward to missing.) The Furies weren’t done flushing out reputed misbehavers at Fox News—if not firing them outright, at least sending them to the penalty box, pending investigation. Earlier this year, Fox Business Network host Charles Payne was suspended for alleged sexual harassment of a former guest, but the bigger story was the abrupt splashdown of Fox News host Eric Bolling, suspended after accusations from multiple sources in a story by Yashar Ali in HuffPost that he had sent female colleagues lewd texts with a picture of male genitalia, the irony being that this brash bucko was so righteously damning of Anthony Weiner for his penis selfies. Now Bolling too had been pulled over for possible weinering. It is a wicked world in which we live, but Karma sometimes gets the last cackle.

What is significant about the Bolling imbroglio is that he was and is one of President Donald Trump’s most manly, two-fisted, top-sirloin defenders at Fox News, bested only by cube-headed Sean Hannity, who is determined to claim dibs on the last deck chair on the Titanic. And it is to the law firm of Trump’s personal lawyer Marc E. Kasowitz that Bolling has turned to launch a defamation suit against the author of the Huffington Post article. Throughout his entire Fox News career Bolling typified the “gorilla mind-set” espoused by macho paleo blogger Mike Cernovich in his book of the same name, an ode to alpha dominance that found its golden fulfillment in the candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump, the gorilla mind-set being the Wagnerian prelude to achieving what Cernovich heralds in his follow-up book as the “MAGA mind-set”—the inner power of Trumpian transformation that elevates the alphas from the also-rans. Thanks to the flubbering failure of Trump himself, the MAGA mind-set now resembles melted cheese, a glop of congealed ego and spilt religion.

Read more: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/09/women-journalists-in-the-age-of-trump


This is a great reid (yes, I totally meant that corny pun ).