Chase
By Alexandra Brodsky • @azbrodsky • 8 years ago

CBS Denver tries to cover sexism against journalist, is sexist

Chase Olivarius-McAllister is an accomplished journalist. As an award-winning reporter with the Durango Herald, she wrote about issues from labor exploitation to environmental disaster. She also took down the previous Sheriff of La Plata County when she exposed his history of domestic violence.

But when Olivarius-McAllister (who, disclaimer, is a friend) came up in conversation at the La Plata County Sheriff’s Office last week, the cops weren’t talking about her reporting. In an act of astonishingly incompetent misogyny, Deputy Sergeant Zach Farnam forgot to hang up after leaving her a short voice message in response to a question about crime statistics. With the tape still rolling, Farnam and another police officer carried out a conversation about Olivarius-McAllister’s body. Jezebel posted the full transcript last week, but if you don’t want your head to explode from rage, highlights include the officers calling the journalist a “fucking bitch,” attempting to estimate both the exact size of her “giant boobs” and the length of her skirt, and wondering whether her teeth look sufficiently British.

Like Dan Savage doesn’t say, it gets worse. Two days ago, CBS Denver ran a story covering the atrocious voice message. Yet the reporters never bothered to ask Olivarius-McAllister what she thought about the thing that had happened to her. Instead, they asked the La Plata Sheriff for comment and lingered on a Facebook photo of Olivarius-McAllister. Seen but not heard, like a good woman!

So, since CBS never bothered to ask what she thought about the voice message, here’s what Olivarius-McAllister had to say about the CBS segment in an email to the channel:

As a journalist, I struggle to understand how what I look like is remotely relevant to – to anything, at all?  This is media-perpetrated sexism at its most narratively pernicious: thanks to CBS Denver’s editorial choices, a story about public employees’ shameful sexism towards a woman who they interacted with professionally instead becomes a barely-veiled CBS Denver-sponsored viewer referendum on my appearance!

Amen.

Washington, DC

Alexandra Brodsky was a senior editor at Feministing.com. During her four years at the site, she wrote about gender violence, reproductive justice, and education equity and ran the site's book review column. She is now a Skadden Fellow at the National Women's Law Center and also serves as the Board Chair of Know Your IX, a national student-led movement to end gender violence, which she co-founded and previously co-directed. Alexandra has written for publications including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Guardian, and the Nation, and she is the co-editor of The Feminist Utopia Project: 57 Visions of a Wildly Better Future. She has spoken about violence against women and reproductive justice at campuses across the country and on MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX, ESPN, and NPR.

Alexandra Brodsky was a senior editor at Feministing.com.

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