The glass house from which Fox News is throwing stones about Harvey Weinstein just got a bit glassier.
As I’ve previously reported, Fox News pundits are almost gleeful as they load the Weinstein scandal into the propaganda barrel for another round in their never-ending war on anyone not in lockstep with themselves. All the while ignoring all the sexual harassment and misconduct right under their own noses at Fox News.
But now it turns out that Fox’s related outlet (each controlled by the Murdoch family), the New York Post, looks rather complicit, too. Frank Rich dropped this nugget in his recent column (with my emphases added):
Weinstein’s behavior toward women was no secret. … [In 2015], a specific incident had surfaced in the press … when a model named Ambra Battilana Gutierrez alleged that Weinstein had groped her. What happened next? “Page Six” of the Post, in league with London’s Daily Mail, immediately and relentlessly trashed Gutierrez as a promiscuous gold-digger looking to trade sexual favors for a show-biz career. (Gutierrez was even accused of degrading herself to score Broadway tickets — available half-price at the TKTS booth — to Weinstein’s flop musical Finding Neverland.) Two weeks later the Manhattan DA, Cy Vance, decided not to pursue charges. End of story. Until now.
We now know that Weinstein’s lawyer, David Boies, was a Vance donor. What we don’t know (yet) is what strings Weinstein might have pulled to get the Post on the case to destroy Gutierrez’s credibility. At the same time Gutierrez’s accusations were being tabled by the DA and derided by the tabloids, there was evidence supporting her case, the chilling tape of her and Weinstein produced by a police sting operation and made public this week by The New Yorker: it contains Weinstein’s tacit admission that he had assaulted Gutierrez, and his verbal bullying as he attempted to force her to have sex with him.
While Fox attacks NBC and other outlets for not reporting on Weinstein earlier, something tells me we won’t see any stones thrown at the Post, even though that publication actively worked to discredit a Weinstein accuser.
That's a lot worse than just not running a story about Weinstein's abuse, don't you think?
Weinstein image by David Shankbone - Own work, CC BY 3.0, Link, via Wikimedia.