NBC -- and its affiliates MSNBC and (to a lesser extent) CNBC -- are known for their liberal slant. All three nominally support feminist causes. If anybody were to ever suggest to the brass at NBC Universal that women should be judged by their looks, they would, publicly at least, act extremely offended.
But it's one thing to pay lip service to feminism, and another to actually practice what you preach. Let's take a quick look at some of the women whom NBC Universal has hired as their newscasters, and ask ourselves precisely what qualities these women were hired for.
Was it because of their keen journalistic instincts?
Their original insights and penetrating analysis?
Their mellifluous voices?
Or might it have been because of their looks?
Here's Amanda Drury of CNBC:
CNBC's Courtney Reagan:
Maria Menounos, a former reporter for NBC Nightly News:
Tamron Hall, who's worked for both NBC and MSNBC:
Melissa Stark, a former reporter for both NBC and MSNBC:
Michelle Kosinski, former foreign correspondent for NBC News:
Norah O'Donnell, back around the time she was MSNBC's chief Washington correspondent:
And Lindsay Czarniak, who covered the 2008 Olympics for NBC:
Where are the fatties?
NBC may pay lip service to feminism, disapprove of fat-shaming, and claim to be against judging women by their looks. But whom do they choose to represent them? Slim, trim beauties.
Does anyone honestly think any of these women would have been hired if they'd weighed 40 pounds more? Of course not: you could even have thrown in 20 extra IQ points along with the 40 extra pounds, and they'd never even have been considered.
(If you're fat, we don't want you.)
And when overweight women sitting at home watch the beauty parade on NBC, do you think that message doesn't sink in?
Fat-shamers are merely saying what the brass at NBC communicate only a bit more subtly: that nobody wants to look at a fat woman.
NBC's dramas, soap operas, and comedies also feature mostly slim, beautiful women, at least in the lead roles. (Comedic sidekicks are allowed to be unattractive.)
The movies they run almost all feature beautiful women.
And the commercials NBC runs are even more skewed toward beauties.
All of these actions speak louder than any words a perky news reporter can utter.
NBC may be the proud voice of liberalism. But it's certainly not the body.
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16 comments:
In my mind fat shaming really showed an ugly side to America when former Playboy playmate, Dani Mathers, took a nude picture of an older, obese woman in a gym locker room and said something snarky like "If I have to look at this, then so do you". She was vilified, lost the job she had and is pretty much thought of as an all around terrible person. Up until that point, I had mostly just heard grumblings...mostly the type in which a person was forced to give up various parts of their seats on a flight due to sitting next to an obese person. The argument always being that the obese person needed to buy two seats etc. It never mattered whether the obese person was male or female. I also remember when a major publication did an article on Chris Christie and his chances of becoming President. I believe the article was titled something like "The Elephant in the Room" suggesting there were things that no one was speaking on regarding Christie. The Elephant was obviously meant to be Christie although I don't think the article came out and said this. I think that women tend to be fat shamed more than men because women tend to be judged on their looks more than men. I have found the more money a man has, the more he feels comfortable carrying around a few extra pounds. I don't find this attribute in women as much. As far as NBC and the women they hire for the news etc., I don't have the expertise to know if these women are not up to the job. Yes, they are very pretty and I don't want to go in the other direction and hold their "pleasing" appearance against them especially when the news is not really what I would call serious news anymore. I'm sure NBC watches the ratings and gives the people what they want. I have also found that as the men who were the more serious news broadcasters are dying off, they are being replaced with men who are the male counterparts to the women who are nice to look at while they give the news. Is NBC just giving a politcally correct mantra when it suggests that it supports women? Yes, but what can they say? Just as the NFL has come out with this fake agenda about domestic abuse. It's just easier to go along with it so that they can get back to the business of making money.
Hannah
Sorry, I forgot to mention that I found a sociopath with full lips. Jill Easter. She is...interesting. She may have had lip injections but I really don't think so because she does not have trout pout. You can find a picture of her online. She is very pretty and was an attorney. Could have been a journalist for NBC.
Hannah
I get a little bit tired of people talking about Fox hotties like the other news channel don't also hire based on looks. I do think Fox might be more demanding but it is on the margins. You could have also put Mika's picture up there too. They aren't in a hurry to hire schlubby guys either. This is why you shouldn't watch too much TV.
Hannah --
Everything you say is true. That Playboy playmate's actions were ugly because she invaded the privacy of an elderly woman who happened to be naked in the locker room. That woman had an expectation of privacy there and for Mathers to take her picture and put it on Instagram or wherever she put it was pretty loathsome.
The hypocrisy with NBC is that they basically promote a leftist point of view, which includes paying lip service to feminism. And one of the central planks of the feminist platform is that it's unfair that women are judged on their looks. So while decrying piggish men elsewhere, what does NBC do? It hires the best-lookingwomen available. I wasn't suggesting, btw, that any of these women aren't up to the job, merely that there are undoubtedly other women around who'd be at least as good at the job, but who aren't good-looking, and therefore have no chance of being hired by the leftist organization. I don't blame NBC for hiring beautiful women; of course they have to do that to have any chance of winning the ratings wars. I blame them for their hypocrisy in simultaneously pushing the feminist viewpoint.
Hannah --
I hadn't heard of Jill Easter before; she does sound like a sociopath. The thin lips thing tends to be truer of male sociopaths than females, though I've also noticed the correlation with sociopathic women, especially killers.
Mark --
Agreed. Fox gets all the publicity about that, but at least they don't simultaneously push the feminist agenda. And yes, all of the networks do it.
MSNBC does have the one obvious exception to the rule with Rachel Maddow, but the presence of all the beauties can't be coincidence. The only channel which doesn't push perky is PBS.
John,
In order to see feminism in casting, you have to watch America's Next Top Model. Not only was Tyra Banks pushing the heavyset girls, in later seasons she openly declared that she "wanted to re-define the concept of beauty" (as though it needed a new definition).
To that end, she cast every manly, tattooed, weird-looking, or misshapen girl she could find, especially brown and black ones. She had at least two trannies (I guess they got lost on the way to the RuPaul auditions), one girl with vitiligo, one burn victim, and several who could have passed as boys. When audiences got tired of her liberal agenda and quit watching, Tyra doubled down on her Odd choices, then hectored her audiences about being closed-minded. (Unfortunately, the UK and Canadian versions of the show do the same thing, but luckily Australia's franchise still cast beautiful girls on its show thanks to its head judge and sponsor, designer Alex Perry, who won't be cowed by PC casting trends.)
The same can be said for several beauty pageants lately. Google the winner of Miss Helsinki (spoiler alert: she's NOT a blond Scandinavian). And watching the most recent Miss USA or America is a similar disappointment: although blacks are 13% of the population, fully half of the pageants Top 10 finalists will be black. When you add the mandatory Hispanic and occasional Asian, white girls can expect to be maybe 40% of Top 10 finalists.
Fled --
I've never seen America's top Model, but it's ironic that Tyra Banks would have that agenda given that she achieved her success partly because of a nose job which made her more "conventionally" beautiful. I wrote about that here:
http://justnotsaid.blogspot.com/2011/09/i-want-her-plastic-surgeon.html
The idea that the Left can somehow succeed in reprogramming what people instinctively find attractive is no different than the gay conversion therapy camps that the Left decries so bitterly. I happen to agree with them on that: you can't "pray the gay away." But neither can you get heterosexual guys to suddenly decide to just be attracted to what they were never attracted to to begin with. The hypocrisy is glaring.
Yes, I've seen pictures of Miss Helsinki, amazing. It was almost as if the pageant organizers were mocking their own agenda by picking a particularly unattractive woman to make their point.
I remember when Vanessa Williams became the first black Miss America in 1983. The pageant had undergone some criticism right before that because it had never had a black winner, so the organizers had obviously decided beforehand to arrange to have a black winner. So, when Williams had to abdicate her crown because of that Penthouse spread, the runner up happened to be Suzette Charles, also black. Think the fix might have been in? I happen to think Williams is beautiful, at least post-nose job (see the link above), but there was no question that a big political decision was made in 1983.
re: Rachel Maddow, I suspect she's probably on the hotter end of the distribution if you limit it to true lesbians.
The concept of fat shaming doesn't make sense to me in that I assume fat people know that they are fat; theoretically it actually helps them by motivating them to lose weight but in practice a person who lacks the motivation to lose weight on their own isn't going to become motivated when people start being assholes to them; instead, they're going to take the shortest cut to eliminating the negative emotions and fight back against the person doing the shaming.
I have, however, always found it weird that women get upset when you ask when you ask their weight (or their age) just as a casual conversation question. You can already see what she looks like so nothing she says is going to change your initial impression.
Jonah --
Yikes, I have a hard time thinking of Maddow as "hot," but I know what you mean -- she's not fat.
"Fat shaming" is just bad manners, but not as bad as, say, "ugly shaming" people who have bad features. There's nothing people can do about their features, whereas there is something they can do about their weight, at least temporarily. (We all have a certain number of fat cells which will never change, the best we can do short of liposuction is to starve those cells.)
Maybe I'm used to hanging out at masters swimming meets where everyone's age is on the heat sheets, so I've never seen that as a big secret, and have made that same mistake regarding age. Regarding weight, I don't ask unless I've given them a compliment leading up to the question first.
Didn't Ted Turner start the "newsbabe" thing back in the eighties? All they really have to do is read a teleprompter, and Red proved it.
Anon --
Honestly, I don't know. Not even sure who Red is.
But to your larger point, you're right, basically all they have to do is read.
Sorry,typo;should read Ted proved it.
As I recall some of the veteran talking heads were a little taken aback by the matter.
"We got the bubble-headed-bleach-blonde who comes on at five
She can tell you 'bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye"
-Dirty Laundry Don Henley
Do as we say, not as we do. No questions allowed.
Those women are slender, and in some sense perhaps attractive, but I wouldn't go as far as "beautiful." Maybe it's the smug expressions, the aging surgery, or something else, but it doesn't seem that they're hiring for beauty so much as they're hiring for "acceptable slenderness."
Weirdly, smaller local stations seem to have more actually-attractive women than larger networks. You can go to a nightclub in most cities and see paid hostesses who are much more attractive than the girls reading news off the teleprompter, so it's likely bigger networks are hiring based on family and business networking, with looks being a secondary consideration.
High Arka --
You're right; I shouldn't have used the word "beauties." Most of them are, to use the numerical ratings system women hate so much, 8's. (Though I'd say Menounos and maybe O'Donnell, at least judging from the photos I used, are real beauties.) One thing that occurred to me as I was writing the post was that all of these women have done the best with what they were given: they all stayed at the right weight, dress nicely, apply their makeup skillfully (and fairly generously), and in some cases, had a cosmetic surgery or two done.
Agree about how there are plenty of better-looking women to be found. There are certain minimal standards as far as intelligence and being good on one's feet and voice that these networks must observe. And a certain perkiness is favored, along with an ability to turn solemn when reading about a fatal fire or the like.
And you're right about "family and business networking." I also wouldn't be surprised if the casting couch comes into play from time to time.
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