By Laura Flanders
In 1992, many suspected that Clarence Thomas would not have become
a Supreme Court justice if US media had taken women more seriously.
A decade later, it’s hard not to feel the same way about Arnold
Schwarzenegger. Given different media coverage, Californians might still
have elected him governor on Oct. 7, but Schwarzenegger would surely
have had a rockier ride to the statehouse — and women’s rights
might have suffered less of a drubbing.
A former Mr. Universe turned actor whose blustery youth was caught on
videotape, an Austrian immigrant whose father volunteered to serve with
Adolph Hitler’s stormtroopers, Arnold Schwarzenegger was no shoo-in
for governor. Not long after the candidate declared his intention to
run, Salon’s Tim Grieve (8/30/03) wrote that the race posed notable
challenges: “The problem for Schwarzenegger isn’t just a 1977
interview with Oui magazine . . . although with references to oral sex
and group sex and admissions of drug use, the interview is clearly a
problem.”
What Grieve called Schwarzenegger’s “raunchy talk — and
allegations of raunchy behavior” suggest a pattern “that began
in the 1970s and apparently continues to the present,” he wrote.
“If California voters somehow get a closer look at this X-rated,
seemingly misogynist side of Arnold Schwarzenegger — that is, if
their local newspapers and TV stations stop talking of Schwarzenegger’s
attitudes in G-rated soundbites and begin to delve into the brutal crudeness
of it all — they may soon decide that there is a lot to not like
about the man who would be governor.”
Californians never got that close a look. As it turned out, boys-will-be-boys
chumminess pervaded the news coverage from start to finish; embarrassing
video footage (smoking marijuana in Pumping Iron, traveling to Brazil
in 1983 for Playboy) barely got a showing. The G-rated euphemisms about
“groping” and “fondling” and “raunchy”
behavior continued, and when the Los Angeles Times finally published
a long investigative report in which 11 women accused Schwarzenegger
of physically assaulting them, it was the paper — not the alleged
attacker — that came in for harsh condemnation. John S. Carroll,
the Times’ editor, told the press that over 1,000 people cancelled
their subscriptions in protest.
“There’s no question the Times used its vast resources to
try and keep Gray Davis in office,” bellowed Fox News’ Bill
O’Reilly (10/7/03). The charges were politically motivated, incredible
and old, said Schwarzenegger’s defenders. (In fact, the earliest
allegation dated from 1979, the most recent from 2000.) The Schwarzenegger
crew’s biggest complaint was that the article appeared less than
a week before the election. The L.A. Times should apologize, chided
Susan Estrich, ostensibly a Democratic feminist pundit, for what her
headline writer called “A Deplorable October Surprise” (10/3/03).
A fairer criticism of the L.A. Times would have been that its reporters
revealed not too much, but too little — and too late in the campaign.
Most of their investigation revisited territory long ago covered by
John Connolly, a freelance journalist who wrote a 2001 profile of Schwarzenegger
for Premiere (3/01) alleging dishonesty, drug use and sexual harassment.
The Times’ allegations were not surprising; pundits had been discussing
charges of the same kind for months already — and dismissing them
out of hand.
“A little bit of fun”
Soon after Schwarzenegger announced his candidacy, Washington Post media
reporter Howard Kurtz hosted a discussion on CNN’s Reliable Sources
(8/17/03). At issue was what Kurtz called the actor’s “past”
comments to Esquire and Entertainment Weekly. (Schwarzenegger was interviewed
in the July 2003 Esquire, and EW’s July 11, 2003 edition.) Blonde
women are some-times smarter than they look, Schwarzenegger told Esquire.
During the filming of Terminator 3, he relished shoving a female co-star’s
head into a toilet, he told EW. “How many times do you get to get
away with this — to take a woman, grab her upside down, and bury
her face into a toilet bowl? I wanted to have something floating in
there.”
Kurtz kicked off the conversation on CNN by mentioning the toilet remark.
“That doesn’t sound like a serious campaign issue,” he
told his all-male panel. “Are these kinds of past statements in
entertainment interviews, where you’re having a little bit of fun,
are they going to get him in trouble?” Kurtz asked. “I think
people in California understand the context of those things,” replied
the Washington Post’s Paul Fahri.
Tolerance for Schwarzenegger ran so high that even the candidate’s
own changing line on the allegations failed to raise many eyebrows.
After the L.A. Times article came out, his campaign denied the allegations
(10/2/03). Then Schwarzenegger made an apology, begging forgiveness
and admitting that “where there is smoke there is fire.”
“Yes, I have behaved badly sometimes. Yes, it is true that I was
on rowdy movie sets . . . and I have done things I thought playful that
now I recognize that have offended people,” said the candidate
(L.A. Times, 10/3/03).
That several of the alleged incidents took place on movie sets adds
to rather than detracts from their seriousness. Since 1980, sexual harassment
has been banned in California as a form of sex discrimination. The legal
definition includes unwanted physical touching or verbal comments that
create “a hostile workplace.” In Schwarzenegger’s case,
several of the actor’s accusers claim to have been humiliated and
degraded by him at work. “I didn’t fall apart,” said
one of two women who described being mauled by the actor on the set
of Terminator 2, “but it’s embarrassing and degrading when
you’re doing your job” (L.A. Times, 10/2/03).
Invisible accusers
The US media showed remarkably little interest in Schwarzenegger’s
accusers. London TV anchor Anna Richardson, who accused the actor of
pinching her nipple during a 2000 interview, was mentioned only twice
on broadcast network news (CBS Evening News, 10/2/03; CBS Morning News,
10/3/03). She was also brought up by left surrogate Alan Colmes on Fox
News Channel (Hannity & Colmes, 10/6/03): “There were charges
about the way Arnold acted in the year 2000, when he made a tour in
England, talked [to] some television hosts; Anna Richardson, one of
the hostesses who was mentioned, made some charges.” Colmes never
got more specific than that.
Peter Manso, author of the Oui interview with Schwarzenegger (8/77),
showed up on Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now! (8/29/03), where he
said he still possessed the tapes of his conversation with Arnold. If
so, those tapes were never aired.
Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman (10/6/03) followed up on the fact that
Schwarzenegger had served for 15 years on the board of the organization
US English, an English-only group with ties to the white supremacist
movement (Intelligence Report, Summer/02). The story got virtually no
play outside of independent media. The same happened when Pacifica radio
station KPFK in Los Angeles (8/16/03) interviewed Robby Robinson, who
trained with Schwarzenegger in the 1970s and described his behavior
as racist and anti-Semitic.
Cast against this array of all but invisible accusers stood one person:
Maria Shriver. Throughout the campaign, and especially at the end, the
candidate’s wife was his No. 1 defender. “You can listen to
all the negativity and you can listen to people who have never met Arnold
or who met him for five seconds 30 years ago, or you can listen to me,”
Shriver told an audience after the L.A. Times story appeared (Orange
County Register, 10/4/03). Shriver’s relationship to a Democratic
family (John, Robert and Ted Kennedy are her uncles) was frequently
cited; the Kennedy family’s tolerance for men who misbehave with
women was apparently not pertinent. While videotape of Shriver’s
speech was replayed endlessly in the days before the vote, Robinson,
Richardson and the rest were MIA.
Power isn’t personal
Schwarzenegger was able to dodge a slew of allegations in part because,
12 years after the Anita Hill hearings, most Americans still fail to
understand sexual harassment — and the media didn’t help.
“The public still doesn’t take this problem seriously,”
Judith Kurtz, a San Francisco lawyer, told the San Francisco Chronicle
after the election (10/9/03). “They don’t believe it’s
a devastating problem to the victims, [they think] that women make too
big a deal out of it.”
The sidelining in the US media of virtually anyone, male or female,
who had an expertise in gender politics guaranteed that the dominant
media debate put character instead of power at the center of the debate,
and it was easy for the “she said/he said” frame to turn the
public off.
Male power isn’t personal, it’s political. It depends mostly
on economic strength, backed up with intimidation and brute force. “What
could I do? He was the highest-priced actor in the world, I was a peon,”
one of Schwarzenegger’s accusers told the L.A. Times (10/2/03).
Hollywood has long been an unfriendly place to women who speak up, says
Karen Pomer, a rape survivor and founder of Rainbow Sisters, a survivor’s
group (who was once profiled by Maria Shriver for Dateline—12/4/96).
Given the climate in the movie industry, says Pomer, it was remarkable
that over a dozen women, some of them named, came forward to accuse
Arnold Schwarzenegger of criminal behavior. What was far less surprising
was that so many of them had remained silent for so long.
Pomer, who is an organizer with Code Pink, told Working Assets Radio
(10/6/03) that she had asked Hollywood’s prestigious Women In Film
group if they would issue a nonpartisan statement saying that it would
be wrong for any studio to retaliate against women who made allegations
of sexual harassment. WIF never responded.
On the eve of the recall, yet another woman, Rhonda Miller, came forward
to accuse Schwarzenegger of assault, and was attacked by his campaign
using the media as its weapon of choice. Schwarzenegger at first acknowledged
making “crude comments” about Miller, but contended that the
rest of the woman’s claims “did not occur.” Then campaign
spokesperson Sean Walsh sent out a memo to select media, directing reporters
to access court records which showed a record of prostitution and narcotics
charges in Miller’s name. The smear was passed along by right-wing
media like MSNBC’s Scarborough Country (10/6/03) and the New York
Post (10/7/03).
As it turned out, there are many Rhonda Millers, and the one who accused
Schwarzenegger has no such criminal record. As Schwarzenegger prepared
for his inauguration, Miller’s lawyer was said to be preparing
to file a libel suit (New York Sun, 11/14/03).
In an angry San Francisco Chronicle commentary on the day before Governor
Schwarzenegger’s swearing-in (11/16/03), Jane Ganahl asked, “What’s
the lesson here? . . . That if you’re famous and charismatic, different
rules apply?” Yes, and that 12 years after Anita Hill, nothing
much has changed. The description Schwarzenegger’s accusers gave
of Hollywood — a high-stakes arena, where power and influence are
tied to gender, race and testosterone — fits much of the media
just as well.
Source: Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
