Unclear Why The Hollywood Reporter Is Honoring a Man and a Racist at Gala for Women

By Caitlin Cruz | November 22, 2019 | 2:15am

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Unclear Why The Hollywood Reporter Is Honoring a Man and a Racist at Gala for Women

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow is going to be getting an award at The Hollywood Reporter’s annual Women in Entertainment gala in December. Farrow will get the award from former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson. Were there any other journalists whose excellent work on the harassment and assault of women in Hollywood to be honored?

Catch and Kill is an excellent book — Farrow’s ridiculous vocal choices notwithstanding — but it seems like the Equity in Entertainment Award at a gala celebrating women would be a great time to…. ya know… honor some women.

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Or, at the very least, not a white person. From The Hollywood Reporter: “The Equity in Entertainment Award recognizes an individual who has worked against gender-based discrimination and toward greater inclusion of women and people of color in the entertainment industry.” I am not discounting Farrow’s excellent reporting and public elevation of his sister Dylan Farrow’s story. However, he has (what seems like) every accolade there is. Maybe we could honor Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, who shared the 2018 Pulitzer with Farrow? Maybe?

And another thing: We need to talk about the complicated matter of Carlson. The treatment inflicted on Carlson while at Fox News was horrific. As she herself eloquently put in November 2016: “Women should not have to face this, in the workplace, period.”

Being a victim subjected to repeated sexual harassment in the workplace does not mean she should be let back into the fold of polite society. In 2013, Carlson (to put this lightly) expressed her confusion about trans people and worried that kids would pretend to be trans as a prank.

From Salon in 2013:

“We know that kids like to pull pranks,” Carlson notes. “Can you imagine now, the boys want to go into the girls bathroom and the girls want to go into the boys bathroom, and they can just say, ‘Oh, well, I was transgender for the moment.’”

In 2008, Carlson talked about “the silent thing that nobody is really talking about” a.k.a. then-presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama’s middle name. It was Islamophobic.

From Media Matters:

“[T]he silent thing that nobody is really talking about here is the reason that he was saying the middle name so many times … is because the connotation is that Barack Obama is a Muslim potentially. His father was a Muslim.”

At a gala specifically to honor people who work “toward greater inclusion of women and people of color” in an industry, maybe you shouldn’t have one of the honorees be someone who seems to deeply not like people of color.