The Double Standard of Sexism

Matt Lauer was a host of the Today Show and a well-known television journalist. On November 29, Lauer was fired from his position on the NBC network after allegations of sexual misconduct and assault surfaced. He was accused of exposing his penis to a female colleague, sending a sex toy to a female colleague with a note describing what he’d like to do to her with the toy and sexual assault.

These accusations all indicate that Lauer sees his female colleagues as sex objects first, colleagues second. Looking back on clips of Matt Lauer interviewing many Hollywood actresses, one can see the disrespect he has for women shining through, from staring at Sandra Bullock’s breasts to condescendingly asking Anne Hathaway “what she learned” about her wardrobe malfunction, rather than focusing on her movie or her career. It was inevitable that Lauer’s disrespect for women and his sexist, one-dimensional perception of them, would permeate into his news coverage of powerful women demanding to be heard. This is clear in the 2016 election.

A staggering amount of women have recently come forward to accuse many of the most influential men in the United States–including Lauer himself, along with Mark Halperin, Ken Friedman, Harvey Weinstein and Dustin Hoffman, among others– of sexual harassment and/or assault.

Now, with the exodus of all these repulsive men from positions of power, we can hope that the vacancies will be filled with respectable people who won’t perpetuate misogynistic values.

These men, specifically the journalists, reported and thus shaped the way in which the media portrayed important people and events. Therefore, some reporters are now claiming that this cost Clinton the presidency, because the biases these men hold against powerful women pervaded the coverage of the election.

If one were to compare Lauer interviewing Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump in NBC’s “commander-in-chief forum,”  the difference is astonishing. Throughout the interview, Lauer interrupts and talks over Mrs. Clinton, and spends eight minutes pelting her with questions on her email scandal. Then he asks her how she thinks voters “feel” when she says her “vote for the war in Iraq was a mistake.”

However, during Trump’s interview, Lauer doesn’t fact-check Trump’s false statements, and presents easy, non-confrontational questions. These questions include Lauer asking Trump how he’s preparing for the role as president, and whether Trump thinks he’s ready to be commander-in-chief.

Many other journalists took a similar approach while covering the election, painting Clinton as an untrustworthy, corrupt and a hostile candidate, while setting their claws aside for Trump. Now we know: clearly the issue wasn’t that Clinton was a hard candidate to connect to, but rather that these men hold biases against women who challenge the sexual-object image they have of women.

Additionally, Trump’s “locker room banter” scandal is illustrative of this unfair bias and sexism. He was caught on a hot microphone boasting of his various sexual conquests, saying, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the p***y. You can do anything.” He was even accused of sexual harassment and assault by multiple women, yet Hillary Clinton’s emails were cast as “just as bad” by the media.

Considering that many of the male media figures who spearheaded the election coverage were behaving similarly to Trump, clearly, these men were not as serious as they should have been in reporting on the urgency of incidents throughout the election, or the objective in their reporting. It’s terrifying to think now that their reporting was what shaped the way in which the voters viewed the candidates.

The 2016 election was a very close race. It could have been any number of factors that tipped the scale: Russian interference with votes, “fake news,” the Clinton family’s drama. But considering that Hillary Clinton, the most qualified candidate in the history of the United States, lost against a man who had absolutely no political or combat experience it’s undeniable that it wasn’t simply that Clinton was going against Trump, who doesn’t play by the rules. She had the media against her as well, led by the sexist men who touted Clinton in a way that was detrimental to her public image.

Now, with the exodus of all these repulsive men from positions of power, we can hope that the vacancies will be filled with respectable people who won’t perpetuate misogynistic values. Perhaps the next female candidate will have a better chance because of this.