The choice to work with Tucker Carlson
My colleague hears the story of a former Fox employee, and asks a hard question.
People talk about “driveway moments,” where listeners stay in the car to hear the end of a story. I have similar moments while broadcasting. When my microphone is off during Morning Edition (sometimes even when it’s on!) I am writing, editing, planning ahead. I can’t always listen. But sometimes a story forces me to stop working—like my friend Leila Fadel’s interview with Abby Grossberg, a former booker for Tucker Carlson. Grossberg is suing Fox, alleging a toxic work environment rife with sexism and anti-Semitism.
Grossberg’s description of her experience was compelling. (In statement, Fox said it would “vigorously defend Fox against her unmeritorious legal claims.”) But what really stopped me was when Leila asked a hard question.
Fadel: I'm listening to you describe a really terrible environment, but I'm also thinking about what Tucker Carlson has said publicly about immigrants. About women… He called Arianna Huffington a pig. He said things like women enjoy being told to be quiet and kind of to do what they're told, that they're extremely primitive. So I do have to ask, like what you were expecting or what you were anticipating when you went to work on the show?
Grossberg: I was expecting and anticipating a professional work environment. I hoped that it was an on air persona and—My story is long. When I was with Maria Bartiromo for three and a half years prior to that, I was never given the promotion for the job that I was doing. So when the opportunity came up at Tucker, I was hopeful that it would be a promotion and that there would be professionalism in the office.
Grossberg worked for Maria Bartiromo, who passed on election conspiracy theories, and her concern was that she didn’t get promoted. So she changed jobs, going to work with Carlson—adding that she hoped in vain that he would not affect the office culture since he worked remotely from Maine.
Now, I can imagine someone arguing that Leila should not have asked this question. I have heard similar arguments in similar situations. Essentially the argument would be, It doesn’t matter what kind of person Carlson was, or what his reputation was. Everyone has a right to a safe work environment. Don’t blame the victim for choosing to work there.
As a matter of fairness or justice, this view sounds right to me. Employees have a right to insist on reasonable conduct. If a workplace is awful, the workplace should change, and employees shouldn’t have to leave it to feel safe. Even if she knew it was awful, she had a right to take a job that suited her particular ambitions, and to expect her employers to uphold basic standards. It would be interesting, to say the least, if Fox defended against her lawsuit by saying, “What kind of people did you think we were?”
(As a non-lawyer, I don’t consider it impossible that we’d hear such a defense. It would be in the spirit of Fox News’ defense against slander, when Fox News insisted in court that Fox News is entertainment, not news. Fox News won! But I digress.)
In the broader frame of life, Leila’s question was necessary and illuminating. Why did Grossberg choose to work at this particular company? Her answer highlights a choice we all face in some form. Any career involves dealing with people you do not approve. I’ll go further: anything worth doing in life is likely to involve dealing with people who do things you don’t approve. That’s life, that’s humanity, that’s democracy. All my histories are essentially about historical characters who had to deal with people they could hardly stand!
But I also think of the Kurt Vonnegut line from Mother Night: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” If we all need to deal with people we don’t approve of, we also have to decide when the tradeoff isn’t worth it.
Today, Grossberg tells Leila that she has a bottom-line understanding of the company where she worked: “They don't care about their audience and they don't care about their employees and they don't care about telling the truth and they don't care about women. All they care about are ratings and revenue. It also shows that they believe that the viewing public is stupid.”
Thanks for reading Differ We Must. I’ve doubled my 400-word limit today, but may be more efficient on other days. If you like what you read here, subscribe! I’ve been given advice to turn on paid subscriptions, and I may do it, so people who support the writing here can do it; but I expect the posts to stay largely free for now.
The “choices” we women have for our careers consistently involve a lot of compromises.
I have also “had” to work with and for sometimes obnoxious and slightly creepy men who did not have my best interests at heart to pursue a career that I love.
“Choice” isn’t really real concept to me. The men I worked with and for for decades vaguely accepted me as long as I made them look good and didn’t disagree with them in public too much.
However At a certain point in my early 50s the toll it was taking was getting obvious. - 30 lbs overweight, drinking far too much - I had to admit that I wasn’t “making it” and it wasn’t getting easier it was getting harder. I fled. No lawsuits. No reckoning with a toxic culture. I took a year long sabbatical hoping I’d figure out what to do.
Finding a supportive work environment turned out to be my number one priority. It worked out for me at least. I found a better job and the supportive environment I was looking for. It involved moving across the country. But the place I left continued to shed employees and financial viability. It’s a shadow of it former self having been gutted by poor management decisions.
Here’s where I land. Ultimately, as a society we either pursue a true meritocracy or we don’t.
If we don’t choosing we are vulnerable to all sorts of Machiavellian power struggles and the consequences of such.
The rise of Authoritarianism is tied to levels of mediocrity in leadership where leaders are bound by loyalty, secrecy and raw demonstrations of power instead of actually working to solve societies problems. I’m a fan of more meritocracy not less. Mostly because of how destructive and despicable the alternatives are.
I really enjoy reading your daily dispatches. But I got halfway today and thought, hey, what about the 400-word cap? Glad you fessed up. I can read 800 some days.