(Nathan Thrash/DD)
Last year saw a wave of allegations of sexual harassment against prominent figures in the media industry leaving journalism students and professors at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication wondering what happens next.
“I think one of the questions in all this is ‘OK, all this is happening, and we’re going to go through this cleansing period and these guys are going to be rooted out,’” said Julia Wallace, the Frank Russell chair at the Cronkite school. “But at the end of the day, what do we do? Do we just sort of move on, or what happens?”
Wallace, alongside Senior Associate Dean Kristin Gilger and Dean Christopher Callahan, contemplated how the Cronkite school should address these issues before deciding to create a new speaker series, titled “Women, the Media and the Workplace.” The series, which addresses the topic of sexual misconduct in the media, is one of the school’s efforts to engage students in a dialogue about critical workplace issues and how to handle them.
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Wallace is also planning to teach an online course on gender and journalism next semester which discusses sexual harassment as well as other issues related to gender in the workplace. Gilger and Wallace are co-writing a book about women in the media and women leaders who have succeeded in the field.
Wallace said she hopes these efforts open up a dialogue about sexual harassment at the Cronkite School so students can be involved in discussions about these issues.
“We’ve taken a variety of steps, and one step was going to the ethics classes and talking about gender issues, but that didn’t really seem like that was enough,” Wallace said. “Students are going to be the ones dealing with these issues, and it’s important that we’re not just sort of talking in the industry, but talking in the journalism schools, and this seemed like a really great way to do it.”
As a part of these processes Wallace and Gilger reflected on their own experience with sexual harassment as well as how things have changed and might be resolved.
“When we were coming up in the business in the late ‘70s, the ‘80s, even the ‘90s, we thought that the way to handle (harassment) was just to be as tough as the guys,” Gilger said.
“We didn’t report things, we dealt with it, or we ignored it,” she added. “We thought that the answer would be ‘OK, it may not be the best environment, but we’re going to prove ourselves. We’ll do great work, and we’ll be recognized and rewarded for that work, and we’ll bring more women in, and that will change everything.’ But we were wrong.”
The allegations of sexual harassment against prominent figures like Matt Lauer, Mark Halperin and Charlie Rose shocked many, but Gilger maintains that the problem of harassment is far more prevalent than it might seem.
“I was surprised by some of the individuals, but no, not surprised that it happened,” Gilger said. “I worked in media, I’ve worked in newspapers for twenty years, it’s a ‘me too.’ We all have had experiences.”
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Wallace, who organized the speaker series, agreed and said that while things may be improving there is still more to be done.
“We’ve made a lot of progress, but we’ve stalled,” Wallace said. “I hope that this movement sort of gets things moving again where they need to go. The question is, can it move beyond a conversation of naming people and into a conversation about what needs to change?”
While sexual harassment is now being discussed more openly, part of the difficulty in eradicating the problem lies in that it’s often exacerbated by other problems, such as a lack of diversity in newsrooms and inequalities in hiring and pay practices.
“If these problems weren’t so difficult, these would have been solved,” Wallace said. “These are difficult cultural issues that have to get worked out.”
Women make up about a third of newsroom employees overall despite comprising nearly 70 percent of journalism graduates, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Men receive about 62 percent of bylines and other similar credits in print, online and TV news, according to a 2017 report from the Women’s Media Center.
“We need to pay attention, not just to individual ‘bad guys’ but we need to pay attention to systems and structures,” Gilger said. “Hiring practices, promotion practices, pay, the support and systems within an organization to deal with problems as they arise. We need to look at systems within our organizations, within our society.”
There are not any concrete ways to solve sexual harassment and other gender problems in the workplace, but Wallace and Gilger emphasized the importance of including men in these discussions and reporting sexual harassment whenever it occurs.
“Female students need to have that dialogue with male students,” Wallace said. “One of the mistakes we made is that we all sat among ourselves and talked about this, which is cathartic and empowering, but ultimately, men have to change as well.”
Gilger also suggested that students who want to help solve the problem do so by continuing to expose the problem of harassment through their work, rather than accepting it as something unremarkable.
“If you’re aware and vigilant, and you encounter things that should be reported, that are genuinely news, then women your age need to feel more like ‘Oh, that’s a story,’” Gilger said. “I mean, I don’t think we even thought of it as a story.”
Gilger mentioned the story of Olivia Messer who wrote about sexual harassment in the Texas Legislature after witnessing it herself in 2013.
“There have been how many generations of reporters covering the Texas Legislature who didn’t see it as a story?” Gilger asked. “What she did was actually see it as a story, which made a difference. Why didn’t anybody do that five, 10, 15, 20, 50 years ago?”
During the first panel the school hosted in the “Women in the Media Series,” Cronkite student Saradon Raboin asked the panelists what advice they would offer future journalists when reporting on sexual harassment in the event that it involves their editors, supervisors, or other higher-ups, given that prominent journalists were implicated in waves of allegations.
She was initially met with silence, followed by a burst of awkward laughter. It seemed that the panelists weren’t quite sure how to respond, further indicating the need for these dialogues.
Raboin says that she hopes the conversation continues to move forward, both within the school and outside of it.
“The speaker series is a great way to get the overall student body involved in the discussion that needs to take place about sexual harassment,” Raboin said. “However, I would love to see a class for female journalists for how to deal with social media and the potential trolls and comments that come with leading a public life.”
Sexual harassment and other gender issues in journalism won’t be solved soon, but both Gilger and Wallace were happy progress is being made to address these issues.
“We don’t know yet, but I see this as progress,” Gilger said referring to the current dialogue about harassment. “Even if I don’t expect all issues to be resolved any time, much less any time soon, if we’re making progress, it’s needed.”
The next discussion in the series will take place Feb. 27 at 7:00 p.m. in the First Amendment Forum. The panel will focus on offering advice to those who experience sexual harassment in the workplace or bear witness to it.
Contact the reporter at Vandana.Ravikumar@asu.edu.
