The trajectory of the #MeToo scandal has been that it's hit the leftiest media, the hardest. NPR and PBS have taken some of the worst of it. So have lefty media pubs. AlterNet now joins the club.
Don Hazen has been an executive at left-leaning media outlets since the 1980s, first helming the influential Mother Jones magazine as publisher and in 1997 starting AlterNet, ..
But five women journalists have told BuzzFeed News that Hazen sexually harassed them while they worked for AlterNet touching them inappropriately, discussing their sex lives, making unwanted advances, sending explicit emails, and showing them explicit photographs — including one of his naked, erect penis. (The women have remained friends since.) A sixth journalist said she was sexually harassed by him, though she wasn’t his employee at the time.
Hazen had previously accused President Trump of "toxic masculinity".
Donald Trump’s election was a victory for toxic masculinity and patriarchy, two issues psychologist Terry Real has spent a career exploring. Since the 1998 publication of his groundbreaking book "I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression,"
AlterNet publisher Don Hazen and associate editor/senior writer Kali Holloway sat down with Real to discuss the role of toxic masculinity in Trump’s presidential win; “blue" and "red" masculinity; the destructive notion of intimacy as a gendered trait; and the trauma created by psychological patriarchy.
As with a lot of lefty accusations, you have to ask if this is really an accusation or a confession.
This follows an inevitable pattern.
Mother Jones magazine’s editor and chief executive acknowledged on Thursday that they investigated Washington bureau chief David Corn for inappropriate workplace behavior three years ago, warning him about touching female staffers and insensitive descriptions of sexual violence, and would now probe the allegations further in light of two emails written by former staffers in 2014 and 2015 and obtained by POLITICO.
Hamilton Fish, president and publisher of The New Republic, resigned from the magazine Friday, following allegations that he had mistreated female employees.
In one such incident, Fish allegedly grabbed a female employee by the neck, leaving red marks. At the time, he was president of The Nation Institute, a nonprofit organization that funds progressive journalism. Fish told HuffPost that the neck-grabbing incident did not happen as described, but he did not offer his own version of events. Female staffers at The Nation Institute also described Fish as consistently undermining them, making sexually suggestive jokes and assigning them menial tasks. He thought of The Nation Institute as his “personal domain,” one staffer told HuffPost.
When Fish was named TNR publisher in February 2016, Nation Institute staffers mobilized to warn their TNR colleagues about their new boss. One current TNR staffer emailed Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor and publisher of The Nation magazine, and asked her to tell McCormack about the circumstances under which Fish had left the institute. (Vanden Heuvel did not respond to requests for comment.)
So that makes two Mother Jones #MeToo scandals. An allegation isn't proof. And yet. both whether true or not, it shows something about the culture of the left.