Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/01/fox-news-has-fired-ed-henry-ov.html
…
9 Likes
2 Likes
He’ll get a position with this administration quickly, rake in enough to outlast his current reputation, then move to the next town down south to join a news cast where people encourage this sort of thing.
SSDD.
4 Likes
That would be OANN.
16 Likes
Or maybe Trump News.
13 Likes
When I was a kid, UK television often got news items from US affiliates with lurid and sickly yellow and orange skin tones. I always assumed it was a difficulty in converting video from NTSC to PAL - but that photo of Henry with the baseball bat rather makes me question that assumption.
6 Likes
Trump’s orange bronzer is probably colour-corrected for NTSC.
3 Likes
I notice the undersides of his fingers are that same strange orange color, but the tops/knuckles look natural.
Either way the guy looks like a real turkey!
Why is there a slice of American cheese…? Oh, never mind, I really don’t want to know
2 Likes
Surprised he’s a horrible person? Nope.
Surprised Fox fired him and it’s public? Yes. I am surprised because my expectations are so low these days.
3 Likes
My guess is that they investigated, realized that if the accuser sued Fox News they’d lose, and amputated Henry in hope of saving the rest of the carcass that is Fox News.
3 Likes
Willful sexual misconduct
Is there some other kind of sexual misconduct that isn’t willful? Like going over to the water cooler with a priapism?
P.S. I misread the headline as “Fox News hires Ed Henry after sexual misconduct investigation” and yeah, sounds plausible in spite of their past track record.
1 Like
Honestly that is what we hope for, right? Immediately investigating and taking serious action?
Whatever their motives, it still sounds like an encouraging step compared to “deny, coverup, and silence”. And if indeed they thought they would loose a lawsuit that is also a positive step.
My cynical take is to wonder if there was some behind the scenes politics or personal vendetta and the sexual misconduct was a convenient excuse rather than a sign of how things will be handled in the future.
6 Likes
Sounds to me like they’re cleaning house to have the high road in preparation of 4 years of calling Joe Biden a sex predator.
1 Like
NTSC = Never The Same Color
3 Likes
They’ve never cared about appearances of hypocrisy before… the difference is this is post me too…
4 Likes
Fox News is as evil as ever, but this doesn’t require conspiracy theories to explain; defending sexual harrassment is just not good business. It costs a lot of money to cover up, there’s no upside, it makes it likely you’ll have to spend more money when it happens again, and at some point it’ll come out anyway. They only did it in the past because the boss was one of the offenders, and had a personal stake in the bad business decision. I am certain Rupert Murdoch didn’t care about the victims, but I also bet he never liked flushing that money down the toilet.
It’s easy to be cynical and think evil always wins – and it does win a lot – but the fact is that the attitudes in The Apartment and Mad Men are losing. You see signs of it with queer rights, too. The right just doesn’t have the energy to keep arguing the wrong side of social issues forever, especially as it’s getting harder for them to sustain wrong economic positions (which they really do mean to defend to the death).
1 Like
It’s also a cost-benefit analysis. Bill O’Reilly was the face of fox news for ages and raked in money for them. Among a significant segment of the population he gave credibility to the whole organization. Losing him was a much bigger loss than Ed Henry. Fox is big and powerful and well established enough now that nobody will likely ever have the kind of outsized stature that O’Reilly did. At the same time, as the public and courts have started to take sexual assault at least little more seriously, and more victims have been willing to come forward and speak publicly the costs have gone up.
1 Like
I was thinking about that, actually. In some industries, that kind of “key man” thinking actually might be seen as a reason to absorb the cost of employing someone who’s going to cost you millions of dollars because they can’t be bothered to not assault their coworkers.
But O’Reilly was hardly some irreplaceable genius in his own right. They can easily train their audience of bitter old cretins to gobble up hateful hot takes from any preening asshole willing to yell at a camera. Any local news anchor will do. Though I guess it does take time, and they’ve learned to not put all their hate eggs in one asshole basket.
But you’re right that it comes down to the bottom line (unless they care about right and wrong lol). Making it expensive to harass employees is surely what makes the difference.
1 Like
