Name: Broad Strokes for August 12, 2016: Sexism at the Olympics and Roger Ailes' Ongoing Sexual Harassment Controversy
Uploaded: 2016-08-11
Duration: 4 min 16 s
Description: We discuss the sexism of Rio media coverage and the ongoing sexual harassment drama surrounding Fox News.

[ MUSIC ] Welcome to Broad Strokes, Fortune's new show that digs into the news that matters to women every week. I'm Kristen Bellstrom. And I'm Valentina Zarya and here are our top stories So, as everyone around the globe knows, the Olympics kicked off this week. And the female athletes are killing it. In the U. S. they're actually supposed to bring home more medals than the men. However, what is not killing it, has been the media coverage. So there have been a lot of complaints about Sexist coverage of the female athletes specifically. I mean, one example of this is Katie Ledecky who's a gold medalist swimmer who has just been racking them up. People have been calling her the female Michael Phelps saying she swims like a man. We're also hearing this with another swimmer, Katinka Hosszu. She won the gold medal and the camera immediately pans to her husband who's also her coach and says You know, here's a man responsible. These are Olympians, they deserve to be talked about as athletes. It's so incredibly frustrating, but it feels like it's just repetition of years gone by. It happens every two years, so it kind of just feels like more of the same frankly to me. I see your point, but I also think there is some positive here. I mean, Twitter jumped all over these commentators when they said this so I think at least the fact that we're acknowledging the problems and in some cases the media commentators actually apologized for their behavior I think that's a major step forward. The other big story that we should definitely talk about this week is the whole Rodger Ails Fox news sexual harassment story. So this has been unfolding now for weeks. Mm- hm. And basically it started with Gretchen Carlson who came forward to say she was sexually harassed by Ailes and that he retaliated and essentially fired her. A number of other women followed, and this kind of all snowballed, and Ailes was forced to step down. Albeit with a massive $ 40 million severance package reportedly. And we're digging into these women's stories, it seems like people at Fox knew about these complaints. They knew what was probably happening Happening and clearly no one did anything about it. So, how does something like this happen and then go on for decades. I actually talked to a few organizational behavioral experts about this and they gave me A few reasons, the first being the culture of fear surrounding Roger Ailes. He's been described as a tyrant, as ruling Fox News with an iron fist, as being able to make or break a media Career and so I think a lot of women were frankly too afraid to say anything. And Shelly Ross who is this veteran TV producer actually wrote an op ed this week in the Daily Beast and kind of confirmed that this was happening for 30 years that you know Everyone knew about it. Kind of it was par for the course. And so I think a lot of people are now wondering is that an Anita Hill moment? Is this a watershed moment for how we think about sexual harassment? Yeah, when people say an Anita Hill moment, what they're talking about is when Anita Hill testified about Clarence Thomas around his Supreme Court confirmation. And that was the first First time we'd ever like really sort of talked about sexual harassment in this country and really have wrestled with it and a bunch of women actually ended up coming forward and you saw a huge spike in the number of sexual harassment cases that were filed. So, maybe that will also make Just your average working woman feel like she can speak out if she's also been sexually harassed. Yeah, I would like to think so, but at the same time part of me is thinking, Ailes is 76 years old, his career is kind of on the decline anyway. He's walking away with $ 40 million, and who knows with this suit how it will even end, so It kind of feels like there's no accountability here. And it feels like an actual repeat of history. Clarence Thomas ended up getting lifetime tenure. Anita Hill, people don't know her name. But it's not like she got anything out of all of this. So on that cheerful note We're out of time. Please join us again next week for another episode of Broad Strokes on Fortune. com. [ MUSIC ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

We discuss the sexism of Rio media coverage and the ongoing sexual harassment drama surrounding Fox News.