The Rundown:
Jezebel says Jon Stewart is a sexist prick and Slate says Jezebel did it for the ratings and the female staff of the Daily Show says it’s a fabulous place to work.
Drama, drama, drama – boy do we love it, don’t we?
Why else would we abandon all logical thought and focus on the comments of a few former employees who have somewhat vague complaints about their former employer (or better yet, the employer who never hired them!?) Don’t misunderstand me. I am all for the critical examination of sexist behavior and institutionalized sexism. I’m just of the mind there should be a though examination of the facts before condemnation– all the facts, not just the ones that suit our predisposed opinions.
And if you can’t do that? Don’t publish.
The author of the original article stated when Jezebel posted a link to the Daily Show female staff response “I just wish the show had agreed to answer questions or make anyone available to talk when I approached them for comment before the piece was published.” What happened to actually presenting both sides in a story, rather than just casually mentioning nobody would talk to you when you asked? This is especially important in a case of employee vs. employer because it’s so often a case of he said, she said (or she said, she said, or he said, he said, etc.)
I challenge you to show me a company or organization who has no unhappy former or never-hired employees. When people are fired, and they are, from every business that ever was –or when they don’t get picked for a job, they can become unhappy with said organization. They come up with reasons that have a tendency to absolve themselves from any responsibility in being fired or not hired. That is human nature. It’s what we do to feel better about ourselves.
Sometimes, the wronged employee is, in fact, wronged. Of course, it happens and I am not suggesting it doesn’t. But let’s face it, when was the last time you had a friend tell you “Yeah, I was fired because I was spending my day surfing porn instead of working,” or “They really should have fired me a long time ago, I am just not very good at what I do and failed to produce any real results for the company.” People get fired all the time for legitimate reasons and yet few will actually own those reasons or be able to admit, even to themselves, that firing them was justifiable. And so, the blame turns to the company. The company is unfair, the company has done me wrong. They are evil and I am good and this is how I maintain my positive self-image and move on.
Human interaction is a messy thing–because it always involves flawed, imperfect human beings with agendas, baggage and even ulterior motives. It could be that the employer is evil or wrong or perhaps just entirely misunderstood. It could also just as easily be true that the employee is one or all of those same things. We can’t really know for sure without at least getting information from both parties and bystanders about what happened. And even then you’ll probably get two or three variations on actual events.
Because people lie. They lie for any number of reasons and this is something we seem to refuse to acknowledge about at least one party in a dispute such as this. People lying about why they were fired is common enough that any claims should be investigated thoroughly before being presented as fact. At the very least, someone’s desire to slam a former employer should at least be viewed with skepticism and an attempt to find a corroborating witness or evidence of some kind should be made.
Really, anybody’s desire to publicly vent the dirty laundry of an employee/employer relationship, no matter which side they may be, should be investigated first and taken as fact last. In this case, as with so many we have seen–the words of a few were taken as truth from the beginning and passed along with careless disregard for accurate representation of the situation.
Careless disregard–that’s right, I said it. Because the author of the original article flat out admits she failed to obtain a significant source of information for her story that, in retrospect, many feel essentially shows her story to be baseless. The careless part is not in that she didn’t try to contact the current female staff of the Daily Show, but in her assumption that their refusal to participate in the story absolved her of any responsibility to find and present the complete picture. It’s not ok to assume you’ve got it right when the other side won’t give you any information and go forward with a story that trashes someone’s reputation without a true handle on the facts.
If you don’t have all the information? Please… shut the hell up.
