In the Year of our Lord 2019, women can do basically anything now, including lead wars, judge court cases with a sexist lens, and also lead racist news coverage as the CEO of a Trump-loving propaganda machine.
On Fox & Friends on Friday, which is International Women’s Day, host Ainsley Earhardt and Fox News contributor Tammy Bruce discussed economic trends that apparently show all women are thriving.
Bruce—most recently remembered for her insistence that all gingerbread cookies are male—used examples like women being able to raise their kids in the suburbs, away from the drug problems of the “inner city,” as evidence of this freedom, which, yikes. She then went on to claim that Democrats aren’t really the party of women (despite having the most female members of either party) because Hillary Clinton and Monica Lewinsky and remember Harvey Weinstein is friends with Clinton and oh my the hypocrisy!
What really took this segment to the next level, however, was Earhardt’s citing Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott, the first-ever woman in that position, as a symbol of female empowerment.
Yeah, I love my woman-hating Fox News CEO, who was named in lawsuits by former Fox News staffers accusing her of failing to respond to their claims of sexual harassment against late former network boss Roger Ailes and allegedly helping to cover those claims up. As the Guardian reported last year, when Scott was named CEO:
According to [former Fox News staffer Julie] Roginsky’s suit, Scott responded to host Gretchen Carlson’s sexual harassment claims against Roger Ailes by seeking to recruit on-air talent and contributors “to retaliate against Carlson by publicly disparaging her”. The suit says she “characterised this retaliatory onslaught as supporting ‘Team Roger’”.
Staffers also identified Scott as the person charged with enforcing Ailes’ strict wardrobe preferences, requiring female hosts to wear the short skirts and other revealing garb. (As the Guardian notes, Scott has denied enforcing such a dress code.) From the Daily Beast in 2016, after former host Gretchen Carlson sued Ailes for sexual harassment, emphasis mine:
Still, interviews on Wednesday with former Fox News employees suggested that Ailes has presided over a corporate culture that values and even demands female pulchritude—or at least Ailes’s blonde ideal of same—over other professional qualities. According to a former staffer, executive assistant-turned-Fox News vice president of programming Suzanne Scott enforces with the wardrobe and makeup departments an aesthetic that features skimpy dresses, high-heeled open-toed shoes, and big hair for the channel’s on-air women.
Happy International Women’s Day, folks. Be sure to limber up before trying to pull off these mental gymnastics today!