Moira Donegan said that when she created the “Shitty Media Men” spreadsheet, it was a first attempt for women to protect themselves from sexual harassment and assault. But that’s all it was. An attempt.
I’m putting it that bluntly, because aside from using latent gossip as the base for an unproductive way to handle accusations, this list excluded many women who work in media from participating. That fact adds grease to the fire in terms of the greatest weakness of the post-Weinstein workplace: We keep rewarding white and upper-class women for coming forward and telling their stories, while simultaneously ignoring or pretending not to see those at the greatest risk for these kinds of abuse.
Since October, Donegan’s list has circulated among the upper echelons of the media world. It was mentioned in various publications, giving it some degree of relevance if not significance in the ongoing coverage of workplace sexual misconduct, but I couldn’t find it online. Articles would mention and describe it, sometimes as the sole subject of a piece, but without actually posting it. Considering that it contained unconfirmed accusations, to do so would have been irresponsible.
In her piece on the list here, Donegan describes it as the result of a “whisper network,” which she says can be unreliable, insular and elitist. She also acknowledges that these networks tend to exclude women who aren’t white.
These aren’t issues that are incidental to the list. Excluding women of color and those without privilege are huge issues, and they aren’t limited to the spreadsheet. The exclusions implicit in the list are just symptoms of a national media industry that favors white people of means.
Sexual harassment, discrimination and assault happen in small and mid-sized markets, too, and if there’s a whisper network to help female reporters avoid those things, I have never found it.
Why would widespread access to some form of a warning system be relevant to women who work in smaller markets? Because in every industry, in the public and private spheres alike, people who do bad things fall from grace, then bounce around from one less prestigious position to the next. This is why it’s a watchdog reporting rule of thumb to investigate a new public official’s background, just in case there’s something there. Despite knowing that, people in our own industry sometimes fail to look into their own job candidates’ pasts.
I’ll give you an example from my first journalism job as the only news reporter at a small-town daily. I had some incredible mentors there, but when they moved on, the management hired a new editor who was not as stellar – not by a longshot.
At first, things were weird but mostly OK. He learned I played the guitar, so he left guitar picks on my desk for me to find without explanation. When I wasn’t there, he got onto my computer and pulled up his Myspace profile so that I’d “find it later,” he told me.
From there, his personality flipped quickly. If things didn’t go his way, he would snap. He yelled at me and other people in the office for no reason. His desk was behind mine, and sometimes I’d turn around to tell him something and find that he had already been staring at me, eyes narrowed, face red, jaw clenched. He’s the only person I’ve worked with who I truly thought might harm me physically, and apart from that, I had to endure him berating me in front of the whole office throughout the day.
To top it off, he was incompetent. Even though he’d worked in pretty big markets, including Dallas, Fort Worth and Las Vegas, his copy was a disaster. He was responsible for one of the most darkly hilarious yet disturbing typos I’ve ever seen in a story about a fundraising luncheon: “The children are delicious.”
Since there were only two reporters at the paper (a sports reporter and me), his main responsibility was layout, and it turned out he had lied about knowing how to do that, too, so I had to lay out the whole paper in addition to writing three stories a day. He also did fun things like put a child victim’s photo in a story about an attempted kidnapping, leading the press guys to call me near midnight one night to come into the office and replace her photo with the mug shot of the guy who tried to kidnap her, which I’d originally put on the page.
At this point, I’m thinking things can’t get much worse, right? That’s when the shit happened. The literal shit.
See, after his arrival, someone began covering the men’s bathroom with their own feces. Almost all the employees at the paper were women, and he and one of his friends he’d brought on to cover sports were the only staffing changes before the shit situation began.
Someone who I told this story asked me how I could be so convinced that the shit belonged to the editor. You know, that’s a fair point. All I know is that before he showed up, our janitor didn’t have to wear a HAZMAT suit to clean the bathrooms.
So, I quit that job. It would have been crazy to stay, especially considering that I’d been turned down for the editing job so that they could hire someone whose inability to do the work was only matched by his inability to resist decorating public places with his own excrement.
At my next job, I found out that he had worked at that paper, too. The story matched in terms of his performance, which was terrible, but it also turned out that he’d tried to rape a fellow reporter during an out-of-town assignment.
Through the years, every once in a while, I’ll Google his name. He never lasts long at the papers he goes to, but he never fails to get another newspaper job afterward, either.
Getting back to the point: A Shitty Media Men list wouldn’t have helped me then, and it wouldn’t help anyone he works with now, because his name isn’t on the list. And aside from that, a shit list isn’t a solution to industry-wide sexual discrimination, harassment and assault, because the list is just a faceless warning. It doesn’t change our work cultures, and it doesn’t hold anyone accountable.
Moreover, the list reflects a blind spot that large media organizations seem content to exacerbate and allow into their own stories about men who are Weinsteined. People who are most vulnerable to workplace abuses aren’t rich white women. They’re people of color, they’re poor people, they’re women who work as janitors in empty buildings in the middle of the night for barely any pay.
While the rest of us are riding the fourth wave of feminism, who is telling their stories? Who is listening? Who is telling them, with some level of sincere assurance, that it’s safe? It’s finally safe to come out and speak the truth.
Contact Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@bigiftrue.org. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.