Hair Brained
The Cable Gamer is somewhat sensitive about “dumb blonde” stereotypes. But she really gets hacked off when they come from an ignorant partisan without a glimmer of a clue what she’s talking about. An apt description for Hadley Freeman, a writer for the lefty Brit “news” site The Guardian. Her article is titled:
Why do all the women on Fox News look and dress alike? Republicans prefer blondes.
That’s nonsensical on its face, and underneath appears a graphic showing three blondes: Kellyanne Conway, Ann Coulter and Ivanka Trump. The alert reader may have noticed that none of these women work for Fox News (in fact Ann Coulter was an employee of MSNBC). But Ms. Freeman isn’t picky about such things as accuracy, and plows ahead with enraptured descriptions of “left wing media women” like Andrea Mitchell who looks like “all the Golden Girls at once.” Then comes the good stuff…the attack on Fox News:
But then we turn to rightwing women. Kellyanne Conway, Scottie Nell Hughes, Tomi Lahren, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Ivanka Trump, and pretty much every single woman on Fox News: a uniform vision of girlishly long bottle-blond hair.
Ms. Freeman must have spent all of three minutes researching this piece. She cites five women who have never been employed by Fox News in any capacity, plus Laura Ingraham who is a contributor (though Freeman doesn’t seem to realize that). In fact, as far as the plethora of Fox News blondes is concerned, that’s as far as she goes. One. Hadley Freeman never cites any further examples, even though she’s sure “pretty much every single woman on Fox News” is a blonde and they all look alike:
When I see them all lined up as talking heads on the news, I get a rare insight into what it must be like to gaze upon the bar area of one of those private American tennis clubs that don’t allow anyone whose name is “too urban” or ends in -stein or -berg. Welcome, people, to death by Wasp… How hard it must be having to operate within such a narrow aesthetic palette. I mean, this is a demographic that considers being brunette a physical deformity…
The author’s ignorance of FNC is impressive. In an article ostensibly about “all the women of Fox News” she cites close to a dozen women…and only one works at Fox. And then she claims Ivanka Trump is “rightwing.” Plus there’s her assertion that she has seen them “all lined up as talking heads on the news,” talking about six women, only four of whom are talking heads (i.e. pundits) and only one on Fox. In what alternate universe are they all talking heads on Fox News?
And as for brunette hair being “a physical deformity” because of a “narrow aesthetic palette,” Freeman is full of it. She clearly has no clue who’s on Fox News and who isn’t. Blondes are not “pretty much every single woman on Fox News.” Most likely they are a minority. If the reader doubts that, your Cable Gamer has assembled a selection of Fox News on-air reporters, anchors, correspondents, and contributors who are not of the blonde persuasion:
It’s doubtful Freeman could pick any of these people out of a line-up, let alone identify them. Yet among those pictured above are a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, a former CBS News correspondent, a winner of an “outstanding newscast” Emmy, a member of the Jesse Jackson family, a former Navy fighter pilot, the first openly gay commentator hired by a cable news channel (Fox), and a six-time Emmy winner who is also America’s most watched female African-American cable news anchor. And there are more than just these 30. To sum it up: Sod off, Freeman. Your incompetent, hair-brained hit job is giving fake news a bad name.
Postscript: The Cable Gamer would be remiss if she did not acknowledge that there are fair-haired females at FNC, and like Megyn Kelly (now with NBC News) they are smart, savvy, and thoroughly professional. They break the blonde of the ordinary.