Attacking Rosie: A lesson for female progressives

Rosie O’Donnell’s exit from "The View" is receiving an awful lot of attention in the news. But, the real story here is how quickly mainstream media followed right-wing commentary in trying to vilify O’Donnell. Mainstream media organizations perpetuated conservative commentary that disagreeing with the war, or speaking out against the president, or asking questions about how World Trade Center 7 fell was un-American and tantamount to treason. Her treatment showed that any woman who engages in public dissent will be subject to attacks on her appearance, intelligence, and sexual orientation.

I am an unabashed fan of Rosie O’Donnell’s, and believe that, in an industry which kowtows to right-wing commentary, she was one of the few progressive voices with a regular TV spot. I didn’t agree with everything that she said, but she engaged in critical thinking and openly challenged political norms, which is more than I can say for most of the "commentators" who appear on TV.

During her time on The View, she became firmly placed in the cross-hairs of right wing commentators such as Bill O’Reilly, Shawn Hannity, and Glenn Beck. They attempted to discredit O’Donnell by attacking her appearance, her intelligence, her sanity, her sexual orientation, and her patriotism. I can’t bring myself to reprint their vile attacks here, but you can get a flavor by reviewing the posts here, here, and here.

What is interesting is that other media outlets began reporting their attacks as if they were actual news. Joe Scarborough held a roundtable discussion on O’Donnell. ABC News reported on the story, and implicitly adopted O’Reilly’s arguments by asking “(D)id O’Donnell go too far?” The Republican National Committee put out talking points on O’Donnell’s views and campaign contributions, and linked her dislike for the term “war on terror” to Democrats’ decision not to use the term in legislation. AOL even got on the bandwagon, reprinting a portion of O’Donnell’s opinions on 9/11, and Bill O’Reilly’s response that she is “nutty” and “irresponsible.” Attacking O’Donnell became the news.

In fact, journalists were reporting the attacks on O'Donnell, and accepting most of the attacks at face value. It would have been a far more valuable exercise to have a discussion on the Gulf of Tonkin, or about the use of torture in interrogations, or about whether US service personnel are receiving adequate levels of care. Instead, attacking O'Donnell became the story. Right wing commentators tried very hard to discredit her, and their efforts were reported as news.

Watching this develop was a sobering and eye-opening experience which carried the following message: if you dissent from or challenge the status quo, we will attack you. O'Donnell's gender and sexual orientation were significant reasons why she was so viciously targeted, and data on female bloggers bears this assertion out. Apparently, women who blog are subjected to 25 times more sexually explicit threats than men who blog.

Salon's Joan Walsh wrote that female writers on her staff received "plenty of insults, and most of them had to do with us as women -- as mothers, as sexual objects, as writers, as professional women in the world." Rosie O'Donnell's critics attacked her in a similar fashion. Her attacks were on national TV and made by mostly white "accomplished" men with TV shows, not trolls on a comment board.

I wrote all of the above over the weekend and yesterday, before seeing the excellent piece by Jennifer L. Pozner making many of the above points, but, frankly, better. This passage was particularly striking:

During her eight-month tenure on The View, a Nexis search shows O'Donnell was berated 186 times by Bill O'Reilly, 91 times by Sean Hannity on Fox News, 41 times by the now-wistful Carlson, and 71 times by MSNBC's Joe Scarborough -- who once called her a "fat, ugly, bully, pimp, loser, ignorant, terrible person, animal. Did I say fat?" If that's not bad enough, a whopping 2,911 local, national network and cable news stories have quoted Donald Trump trash-talking O'Donnell, calling her "disgusting," "crude," "arrogant," "pushy," "self-destructive," "a degenerate," "a stone-cold loser" and so hideous that her wife must be grossed out "having to kiss that every night."

The nasty, vitriolic rhetoric spewed about O'Donnell was a reminder misogyny is alive and well, and will be used as a tool to quash dissent and to silence questioners. Regardless of whether you agree with O'Donnell's viewpoints, her treatment was chilling to witness.