With the news that Vox Media has dismissed two employees, including a high-ranking editorial director, it is becoming increasingly obvious that throughout our elite media — the very same media that told us “binders full of women” disqualified Mitt Romney from becoming president — there is a culture that enables the systemic sexual harassment and abuse of female staffers.
After a former employee accused the company of ignoring and even tolerating sexual misconduct, Vox Media fired editorial director Lockhart Steele late last month. The timing of Vox Media’s inaction and eventual action suggests that the company had no intention of doing anything … until this employee went public.
The Hollywood Reporter reports that, on Friday, another Vox Media staffer was forced to resign. This person remains unnamed, but a now-concluded investigation into the scandal forced this person to exit the powerful media company.
Vox claims an investigation into these allegations was done in 2016 but that Vox Media chief legal officer Lauren Fisher now wishes she could have investigated the claims “more vigorously.”
Vox Media is a left-wing media outlet, home to Ezra Klein’s “explanatory journalism,” The Verge, Recode, and a half-dozen other “progressive” sites.
The company has posed for years as a moral authority on the issue of sexual harassment. Last year, and with great fanfare, the company announced an initiative to stop online harassment.
Vox’s unnamed employee and Lockhart Steel, along with NBC’s Mark Halperin, NPR’s Michael Oreskes, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, the New Republic’s Hamilton Fish and Leon Wieseltier, and Mother Jones’s David Corn, now add up to eight members of the elite media accused of everything from indifference to harassment to groping.
And yet, the cover-up continues.
Those within the elite media with something to lose by admitting they knew and did nothing continue to claim they knew nothing. Meanwhile, those with nothing to lose (or gain) by saying so continue to inform us that almost every one of these cases was either an “open secret” or previously reported to a media company in the form of a harassment complaint.
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