Connecting the Dots: Jeffrey Toobin, Sexism, The New Yorker
By: Michele Beaulieux
Tags: Sexism, Connect The Dots, Rape Culture, The New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin

Eustancey Tilly connects the dots ©2020 Michele Beaulieux

Here I go again, banging my head against the wall: I just wrote yet another letter to the editor of The New Yorker about sexism in its coverage. I’ll share it once it’s clear that it’s been rejected. In the meantime, I want to connect the dots about why I’m pessimistic that it will be published. [Update: Happy to be proved wrong! My letter on Wikipedia missing women will be published in the December 14th issue.]

In a previous blog post, “My Rejected Letters to The New Yorker,” I shared my previously rejected letters. They’ve got a pattern. Most point out sexism in the magazine authors’ assumptions and writing, sexism so glaring that I question why, if the writers were as clueless as they apparently were, that the editors didn’t step in. It wasn’t surprising, then, upon reflection, that those same editors didn’t find my letters or any other complaints of sexism within the magazine’s pages newsworthy enough to warrant publishing. (In my friends’ and my recollection, The New Yorker hasn’t published any letters calling out sexism in its coverage. If you know of any, please let me know.)

Somehow, though, the powers that be at The New Yorker’s parent, Condé Nast, apparently sprung quickly into action this month when they fired star legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin after he flashed his stuff during a Zoom staff meeting. (Toobin remains chief legal analyst for CNN Worldwide.) As Myriam Gurba of Luz Collective reports, Conor Friedersdorf, a writer for The Atlantic, excused the supposed one-off non-consensual exposure with the “oops” defense. We may not ever know Toobin’s intent but we know the impact: it’s tough to unsee such things.

But this wasn’t Toobin’s first “lapse in judgment.” Toobin, married with children, had a decade-long affair with a younger staffer at The New Yorker. When she got pregnant in 2008, he dealt with the situation less than honorably. The New York Times, despite having reported on the staffer’s battles to get Toobin to step up as a responsible father, apparently did not find this previous issue relevant and so did not mention it when reporting his firing. Other major news outlets had similar amnesia. Feminist attorney Kate Kelly, however, remembered and pointed out Toobin’s pattern of questionable sexual judgment and harassment on Twitter. A decade ago, the Daily News had reported that he had also harassed another female professional.

Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple pointed out: “His value as a commentator, after all, flows from his judgment, a commodity now in tatters.” Exactly. In the same opinion piece, Wemple overviews Toobin’s stellar career in a farewell review, pausing to give accolades for Toobin’s ability to recognize that he messed up in his coverage of Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid by succumbing to that nasty false equivalence paradigm. Wemple, though, doesn’t see Toobin’s reporting on Clinton as an example of his poor judgment. Toobin’s unfair editorial treatment of the nation’s first female major party presidential candidate, however, is not unrelated to his questionable workplace behavior.

To connect the dots, Clinton lost to Trump, a man whom dozens of women have reported sexually harassed and assaulted them. Toobin, as it turns out, has a penchant for sexual harassment in common with Trump. Toobin’s assessment of a woman’s political capabilities on the national stage was colored by the same sexism that pervades his treatment of women in his professional relationships. He is a prime example of the futility of separating a man from his work.

In light of Toobin’s long-standing behavior pattern, Condé Nast’s response wasn’t so quick. They’d been dragging their feet for more than a decade. Toobin was able to continue his inappropriate workplace behavior because of who he knew and the rape culture in which he was operating. Toobin came to The New Yorker, on the advice of his friend, David Remnick, who is now its editor. The previous editor Tina Brown, who hired Toobin, talks openly about the sexism she faced at Condé Nast.

The good old boys can overlook each other’s transgressions, but I can’t, especially when they are shaping the public opinion that is shaping our nation. Toobin’s personal activities reflected his attitude, and his attitude showed up in his reporting. The writers and editors of The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and The Atlantic may not be connecting the dots, but we can. Let’s.

© 2020 Michele Beaulieux. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). That means you are free to share and adapt as long as you attribute to Michele Beaulieux, don’t use for commercial purposes, and use this same license. And if you do share, I’d love to know! I may revise, so to avoid sharing an outdated version, I recommend linking to this page, where I provide the date of the current iteration. 12.3.2020

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